Microsoft Compliance as a Managed Service

This article is for Microsoft partners who wants to develop a Compliance service to their customers.

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The rapid shift to digital work and an increase in the volume of digital data has resulted in the introduction of new regulations and standards around data protection and governance.  A recent study shows that there was an average of 257 daily regulatory alerts across 190 countries in 2020 and keeping up with regulatory changes continues to be the top compliance challenge. For most organizations, navigating this ever-evolving compliance landscape is daunting and time-consuming and this presents an opportunity for partners.

Partners can provide services that help customers to prepare and pre-check for audit, provide compliance auditing services, and help a customer define or implement their compliance strategy.

Partners also can help customers meet general compliance requirements by:

• Driving awareness of how Customer Lockbox can help meet compliance obligations for controlling data access by
• Microsoft support engineers.

• Enabling full audit tracking to monitor and investigate events related to data.
• Reducing cost and risk with in-place intelligent advanced eDiscovery.
• Equipping customers with the ability to efficiently perform risk assessment with Office 365 Service Assurance.
• Preventing, detecting, and containing internal risks with the insider risk management feature in Microsoft 365
• Managing data retention with Microsoft Information Governance.

In any combination, these make up core components of any compliance-related managed services offer. However, there is an even more critical opportunity on the horizon that motivates building a compliance managed services offering—one that is predicted to create a $3.5 billion market opportunity for security and storage vendors according to IDC.

A technology focused privacy risk assessment should help the customer identify:

• Privacy definitions germane to the jurisdictions in which the customer conducts business
• The nature of personal data that is collected, processed, or stored
• Where such information is stored (both logically and physically)
• How it is protected in-transit, in-use, and at-rest
• How it is shared within the company (e.g., between business units)
• How it is shared with entities outside of the company (e.g., by third party service providers)

Partners can conduct gap assessments that identify privacy “hot spots” and make recommendations on technology,

people, and processes that customers will need to address to achieve regulatory compliance with applicable privacy laws.

Five key reasons Why should partners utilize Microsoft Solutions for Privacy Compliance

1. Microsoft was the first major cloud services provider to pledge GDPR compliance
2. Microsoft has been an industry leader on Model Clauses, HIPAA, ISO 27018, and is taking a similar lead on GDPR and CCPA compliance
3. Microsoft offers the most comprehensive set of compliance capabilities of any major cloud service provider and has the best baseline to build from
4. Microsoft provides a single stack solution—all pieces work well together
5. Microsoft’s compliance solutions enable multi-cloud compliance to integrate with customers’ existing security and compliance investments.