This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Financial Services Blog articles.
Financial regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (2002) or MiFID (2004) embedded the importance of data governance deep into the operations of your company more than a decade ago. But when was the last time your firm thoroughly reviewed its approach to data governance? Right now, do you keep everything—just in case you might need it for an audit, report, or legal case? Are you outsourcing archiving to a third party? And, how do you plan to ensure your data governance keeps up with exponential data growth and a regulatory landscape that continually evolves?
Now more than ever, the financial services industry is looking to adopt a strategic data governance solution that keeps data in place. By 2020, IDC predicts that the volume of digital data will have expanded at a compound annual growth rate of 42 percent. [1] This growth is being driven by an ever-increasing number of sources, in many different formats—all of which must be carefully protected. As the amount of data in your organization increases, so do the demands on your organization to be compliant with legal and regulatory requirements to quickly find, keep, and protect data.
Another common cause for data governance woes among financial services firms? Human error and ransomware that could jeopardize your data, especially if it is being managed in more than one location today. 81% of IT leaders surveyed reported being concerned or very concerned about missing out on new data protection advancements related to cloud. And 68% said the volume of data to move was preventing progress in moving more apps and data to the cloud.[2]For financial services firms, proactively reducing risk by managing data governance provides great benefits including: helping to reduce eDiscovery costs; improving compliance; minimizing the risk of a security breach or inadvertent data leak; and providing a response plan that can be put in place quickly if an incident occurs.
Microsoft 365 includes a suite of tools to help financial services companies take a big step forward in their data governance strategy—all without hindering the productivity of employees. Cloud-based features deliver governance policies you can apply either automatically or manually, as well as the ability to retain content in-place, in its original location, so users can continue to edit and work with the content as if nothing’s changed.
Organizations can become more agile by ensuring your users work only with content that’s current and relevant to them. Office 365 helps you improve your compliance posture, reduce risk, and improve efficiency by providing easy-to-use functionality to:
- Create policies. Decide proactively whether to retain content, delete content, or both across the entire organization or just to specific locations or users. Apply a policy to all content or content that only meets certain conditions, such as content containing specific key words or specific types of sensitive information.
- Monitor communications. By monitoring email or IM content, you can better define policies that capture email and third-party communications, so they can be examined by internal or external reviewers.
- Establish default alerts. The service leverages cloud intelligence to automatically detect anomalous governance, like an unusual volume of file downloads, compared to regular usage of the service.
Download this free infographic to get a detailed overview of how your financial services organization can make the most of data governance in Microsoft 365.
[1] EETimes. Digital Data Storage is Undergoing Mind-Boggling Growth
[2] December 2017 Executive Cloud Survey, CITO Research and Commonwealth