Compliance
Automate the protection of your data – Make the right choices
2 October 2023
The true value of governance
Governance is essential for establishing standards, policies and guidelines that ensure the smooth operation of a business and compliance with regulations. However, simply developing these rules and procedures is not enough. The true value of governance lies in its effective application. In other words, well-designed governance remains ineffective if it is not put into practice in a consistent and rigorous manner.
How can you guarantee the implementation and continuity of your policies?
This question concerns many business leaders and those responsible for the protection of personal information in Quebec. The introduction of Law 25 brings its share of challenges for Quebec entrepreneurs in terms of governance, management and the application of measures to comply with the new standards. Integrating these into corporate culture is a challenge in itself, but how to guarantee compliance with these rules today and for the future is quite another!
In this article we will discuss the issues facing managers and those responsible for the protection of personal information within Quebec companies and how the technologies of the Microsoft365 and Azure suite allow companies to ensure compliance with new standards while maximizing the technological choices already made.
Questioning oneself
Companies have been constantly contacted since the arrival of the new law 25 by different specialized or non-specialized firms, whether legal or IT firms, most of which offer third-party solutions, consultations or security audits. But before embarking on a process, adopting or replacing technological solutions, ask yourself these few questions:
- Does my company already have a governance policy?
- Does a legal partner know my technological environment and be a good advisor for my IT?
- Do I really need to deploy probes on my environment and change our cybersecurity solutions?
- Is a technology partner the best resource to advise me on legal matters within the framework of law 25?
- Is a technology partner a specialist in drafting governance policies?
- Do the proposed solutions take into consideration the strategic plan established for my IT?
- How do these new solutions maximize my choices and investments made such as Microsoft365?
- Is it possible to regain control of my data?
All these questions raise reflections, but it becomes obvious that different areas of expertise are necessary to ensure a solid foundation for your governance.
Why reinvent?
Well before Quebec, in 2018 Europe adopted a law concerning the protection of personal information, the GDPR came to regulate the collection and use of the personal information of Europeans. Companies quickly found themselves faced with major challenges. The volume, different sources, storage and sharing of data all had to be addressed in order to make sound data governance credible. In addition, a method had to be put in place to trace any personal information that could belong to an individual.
The industry had to adapt quickly in order to offer cutting-edge solutions that would coexist with the rapidly growing cloud computing tools in 2018. Microsoft once again positioned itself as a leader by bringing to market the Microsoft Purview solution which allowed companies to have a centralized vision and secure the information they held.
In January 2022, Microsoft launched Priva, a risk management and policy automation solution that helps businesses build resilient privacy and risk management workplaces.
How to maximize your investments?
When the time comes to evaluate or choose a data governance and protection management solution, it is important to have a long-term vision. This way of approaching the subject will allow you to put into perspective the elements that will ensure that your data governance can endure and transform into advantages for your company.
If, like many companies around the world, you have adopted Microsoft365 and Azure collaboration and productivity tools, you have probably already benefited from the advantages that these solutions offer you. Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, OneDrive, already simplify the work of your users by facilitating collaboration between them, your customers and suppliers.
So, before adding software to your environment, you are probably asking yourself these questions:
- Does the Microsoft 365 suite or Azure already offer what we are looking for?
- Are we using our Microsoft365 suite or our Azure solution to its full potential?
- Our Microsoft365 or Azure licenses cover this type of functionality?
Why not start the same thinking for your data governance and protection needs? If a perfectly integrated, compatible, intuitive solution maintained by the same provider that offers you the Microsoft365 suite and Azure is available, would you be interested? It’s worth thinking about!
Our choice falls on Microsoft, why?
- Maturity of the solution and adoption worldwide by thousands of companies
- Solution developed and supported by a long-term vision
- Unprecedented integration with the entire Microsoft365 suite, Azure and Windows
- Ease of deployment and autonomy for businesses
- Over a hundred data connectors to accommodate different data sources
- Combination between governance, risk management, incident management
- Incident management and automated processes
- No direct impact on your IT equipment
- No dependency on third-party providers
Once implemented, management of the solution can easily be transferred to one of your resources to carry out daily operations. Intuitive interfaces combined with integration with your tools allow you to quickly achieve operational autonomy. Governing your data is, in a way, your responsibility.
Microsoft is becoming essential given the depth of the solution, the ease and speed with which it can be deployed. In addition to being 100% integrated into your Microsoft ecosystem, these proven solutions have already met the needs of Europe since 2018, so why not focus on them?
How Microsoft Purview & Priva facilitates data governance and protection?
Without going into too much technical detail about this solution, we can say that Microsoft Purview-Priva allows you to take control of your data and automate the various tasks necessary on a daily basis to maintain compliance with your policies.
In other words this solution allows you to:
- Democratize, discover and catalog all of your data.
- Carry out an interactive and continuous inventory of your data on your servers, workstations, Azure, SharePoint,
- Outlook, Exchange, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams, SQL databases and many others.
- Quickly classify and identify personal information or sensitive data in your organization.
- View and evaluate the use and access to personal and sensitive data by your users.
- Quickly access your company’s sensitive data through a dashboard to create data protection policies.
- Proactively identify and remediate privacy risks, such as data hoarding, sharing, and automating the data lifecycle.
- Dynamically inform and educate your users when they access or share personal information or sensitive data.
- Automatically prevent data leaks by ensuring constant monitoring of your different data sources.
- Automatically process requests for access to your employees’ personal information
- To equip your users by transforming your directives into dynamic and intuitive control mechanisms.
In conclusion
The new regulations in Quebec have made companies realize the importance of the data they possess. Beyond personal information, data protection also applies to any data that is valuable to your business and makes it competitive. It is therefore normal for managers and those responsible for the protection of personal information to question and question certain processes in order to be able to mitigate risks and ensure their compliance with the various regulations.
Taking the time to assess the needs and expertise necessary to complete your compliance project is a gamble that pays off in the long term.