This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Financial Services Blog articles.
This week at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, Florida, we introduced exciting new capabilities in Microsoft 365 that financial services institutions will want to take advantage of right away.
When it comes to video conferencing, many financial services employees are concerned that confidential information could be disclosed accidentally if conference participants can see the information written on whiteboards in the video’s background. To reduce the risk of this happening, Microsoft Teams now has a background blur feature, which uses facial detection to blur the background during video meetings. With this new capability, investment bankers, wealth management advisors, traders, risk managers, and banking executives can be sure confidential information about deals in the background of a video conference won’t be shared.
Financial analysts and others who work with stock information in spreadsheets will love the new data types in Excel. They can use Stock and Geography data types - generally available soon - to easily get company information, population, area, and more. Also, using new image recognition capabilities in Excel, they can take a picture of a hand-drawn or printed data table and turn it into an Excel spreadsheet instantly, which is extremely helpful when capturing data from a whiteboard or a paper copy of a data table.
In a regulated industry like financial services, a virtualized desktop experience helps ensure compliance regulations are met and access to sensitive data is securely managed. Newly announced Windows Virtual Desktop is the only cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience, optimized for Office 365 ProPlus, and includes free Windows 8 Extended Security Updates.
Compliance Manager* has been expanded to offer 12 assessments, including FFIEC. These assessments can help you proactively enhance your data protection controls and meet compliance obligations. Financial institutions can view a dashboard that summarizes Microsoft’s and your organization’s control implementation progress for Office 365 across various standards and regulations from multiple jurisdictions globally.
There are other new features that help enhance security and simplify regulatory compliance, all of which enhance the Data Governance & Privacy solution for financial services. The unified labeling experience is now available in the Security & Compliance Center as a single destination where IT can create, configure, and automatically apply policies to ensure protection and governance of sensitive financial and personal data. Multi-Geo in Office 365 enables you to pinpoint where each user’s data is stored at rest across multiple geographies all within a single Office 365 tenant. Customers can now enforce Zero Standing Access for privileged admin access within your organization. These capabilities can help financial institutions more easily achieve compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and financial services regulations.
New support for password-less sign-in via the Microsoft Authenticator app is also now available for the hundreds of thousands of Azure Active Directory connected apps that businesses use every day. Nearly all data loss starts with compromised passwords. Today, we are declaring an end to the era of passwords by enabling financial institutions to eliminate them to ensure a secure environment.
See the other blog posts associated with Ignite for more information: 10 new ways for everyone to achieve more in the modern workplace” and “Start using Microsoft 365 to accelerate modern compliance tart using Microsoft 365 to accelerate modern compliance.”
*Compliance Manager is a dashboard that provides the Compliance Score and a summary of your data protection and compliance stature as well as recommendations to improve data protection and compliance. This is a recommendation, it is up to you to evaluate and validate the effectiveness of customer controls as per your regulatory environment. Recommendations from Compliance Manager and Compliance Score should not be interpreted as a guarantee of compliance.