Provisioning & Governing Microsoft Teams For Hybrid Work

By Mike Zawisza and The Prosperoware Team

The shift to hybrid work environments has changed the way organizations operate and handle processes related to data & governance. Since the start of the pandemic, Teams has emerged as the collaboration platform to support the growing need for internal and external collaboration.

As of April 2021, Teams has grown to over 145 million daily active users globally — a meteoric rise from the 20 million users from November 2019 — making it Microsoft’s fastest growing platform. Teams provides rich collaboration capabilities designed to improve project delivery. Organizations can arrange their projects, matters, engagements — whatever you may call it — with Teams and Channels, and co-author documents in real time with both internal and external users.

Since organizations do not solely rely on one system but several — including Teams, DMS, CRM, HRIS, and more — data chaos can quickly emerge. And while Teams has the functionality to do wonders for collaboration, it can quickly become chaotic if not managed and governed properly. This makes organizations vulnerable to cybersecurity risks on top of adoption challenges.

Wondering how your organization can mitigate such data chaos? Let’s find out.

Reduce Data Chaos through Teams Provisioning

When left to their own devices, users will create numerous Teams for one matter with names and Channel structures most convenient to them. This practice can quickly spiral into chaos and become a nightmare for any organization’s risk, privacy, and compliance professionals.

To properly mitigate data chaos, users need logical locations to place their data. Teams offers the option of carrying this out through manual provisioning, but for organizations that need to process hundreds and thousands of projects and engagements a day, this option becomes inefficient, costly, and poses privacy risks. Automating this process is key.

Our software solution, Prosperoware CAM, addresses data chaos & governance issues to mitigate privacy and cybersecurity risks. CAM enables automatic and on-demand provisioning of Teams, Channels, SharePoint sites, OneDrive folders, OneNote, Planner, Lists, internal and external users & groups, and more, with standardized naming conventions and templates to fit simple and complex use cases.

Assign Context and Structure to Data through Governance

While provisioning enables logical saving and storing of data, organizations still struggle to locate and protect it, which poses a challenge for end-users, risk & compliance officers. Proper governance goes hand-in-hand with provisioning of data.

Our CAM solution enables the application of rich custom metadata so that end users efficiently locate data, while risk management teams understand it’s context across collaboration systems, strengthening security and minimization policies. This assures your data and projects are not only stored appropriately but given the correct levels of access and oversight.

Proper governance and provisioning, aren’t just methods of increasing efficiency, but also a way of bolstering your organization against the ever-growing threats of cybercrime, cyberattacks, and cyberespionage. The rapid adoption of new technology during the pandemic exposed key organizational vulnerabilities and left them open to brazen hackers and cybercriminals. These attacks aren’t just localized to high profile cases like SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, and Colonial Pipeline.

In fact, 75% of organizations that deploy Microsoft Teams do so without proper governance and security policies in place, so it should come as no surprise that any organization, regardless of size, can be hacked or fall victim to what we call “the bad day.”

Organizations must aim to protect the data they need and minimize what they don’t need. By tackling data chaos and setting proper provisioning across systems, like Microsoft 365, the DMS, and other systems, Zero-Trust security becomes consistent and efficient.

Sometimes, a third-party solution is needed to take you that last mile.

How Prosperoware Helps

Prosperoware CAM is a Software-as-a-Service platform (SaaS) for adoption and governance of collaboration systems. It allows organizations to provision, classify, protect, move, and minimize data, mitigating data chaos and reducing risks related to privacy & cybersecurity. CAM integrates with Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, Lists), iManage, NetDocuments, HighQ, and more to come.

CAM enables organizations to create logical locations for users to place data and provides rich custom metadata capabilities to empower users to locate data and risk management teams to understand context so they can apply the right security and minimization policies.

CAM enables organizations to create logical locations for users to place data and provides rich custom metadata capabilities to empower users to locate data and risk management teams to understand context so they can apply the right security and minimization policies.

Here is what CAM can do for you:

• Provisioning of workspaces, Teams, Channels, Lists, Users & Groups, and folders from Project Portfolio Management, CRM etc., or through a human workflow using readily available templates.
• Rich, custom metadata for project or document context.
• Unified project directory for content location for end users and risk management teams.
• Provision automatically or on-demand internal & external users, manage permissions across collaboration systems, and integrate with leading ethical wall systems.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with activity monitoring and bulk security & metadata changes.
• Minimize data by setting automatic data disposition policies or apply litigation hold.