Introduced by Microsoft, Compliance Manager is a data tracking system designed to ensure companies adhere to General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Organizations can sign up for paid Compliance Manager or subscribe to a free Compliance Manager via Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Azure, Dynamic 365 or Microsoft Cloud Services. Microsoft recently released the long-awaited office 365 GDPR Compliance Manager with a few upgrades. Professionals are eagerly trying it out and giving their opinions about this exciting new product. The compliance management tool is expected to attain general availability on different platforms in the course of 2018. Here’s a sneak peek at the basic attributes of this highly anticipated GDPR data protection compliance tool.

Relevance of the new Office 365 GDPR Compliance Manager

Microsoft finally unveiled their much-awaited General Data Protection Regulation program that experts have been so excited about. Shortly after, they announced its features in a blog post and details of the new features to help users get started. Most users do look forward to new office products, but this one has been designed to make compliance to the new GDPR regulations much easier. That makes it a valuable tool that every business needs. Most business owners confess that they don’t know enough about the new GDPR rules and they are not ready for the May 25 deadline.

One key attribute of the new Office 365 is that it will include the compliance manager which was first previewed in November 2017. To date, the compliance manager is available on Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365 Business. Plans are also underway to have it available for Enterprise Customers via public clouds in the near future.

So what’s all the fuss about the new Office 365 GDPR Compliance Manager?

Customers have complained about difficult-to-understand compliance challenges and the GDPR is admittedly a complex document. Microsoft has attempted to take some of the complexity and mystery out of these regulations so that business owners can comply without having to hire outside help.

The most common challenge has been the lack of in-house employees who understand how to prepare and fulfill these new regulations. Office 365 GDPR Compliance Manager is tailored to ensure end-to-end regulation compliance. It also effectively empowers your business to manage the three key components of compliance. As your business uses this product, it will continuously provide you with a risk assessment and score that can alert you if you aren’t in full compliance in some areas.

Advanced GDPR Compliance

Microsoft’s Compliance Manager was developed to track an organization’s IT systems in specific regard to the requirements of international standards for data protection. One major issue has been that many company owners have simply not taken steps to be ready for the May 25 deadline, when all web sites who do business with European companies must adhere to EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

To help with this problem, Microsoft has unveiled a special GDPR template which will effectively detect and categorize personal information in your data base relevant to GDPR. This is important because many companies are still somewhat careless with their customer’s personal data. According to GDPR, companies failing to provide adequate protection for customer data could face penalties of up to €20 million.

The Compliance Manager has two features that customers will use to scan and assess data risk:

1. Compliance Score- Users are now able to assess data risk on an interactive dashboard on the new Microsoft 365 GDPR.
2. Azure Information Protection Scanner- This feature identifies, classifies, labels and effectively protects both on-premises and hybrid user data. It periodically scans sensitive data on emails and attachments based on the organization’s policies.

New Admin Role of Compliance Manager

Along with these two outstanding updates to Microsoft Compliance Manager is a unified labelling tweak on the admin dashboard. Microsoft cited protection of documents as the main reason for unified labeling, which it denotes as information protection administration. In the past, security admins and global admins could access the systems as separate entities to the Azure data protection service. With the new Compliance Manager, the option of additional management access permission is missing on the Azure portal and PowerShell unifying security and global admin roles.

With this new set up, the compliance manager ensures consistency in the labeling of information for easy protection of data records. However, the unified admin labeling role is still on a preview phase. At the moment, it allows the admin to apply a data protection setting which differentiates security functions from general global admin functions on a single interface in line with GDPR. Microsoft’s compliance manager is now available for customers on a paid program and or a trial option for users of Microsoft cloud services.

The Future of Data Compliance

The number of customers and companies worried about cyber theft is growing. Consequently, there’s a rising need for tools that can help protect customer data. The GDPR attempts to do this. As long as data stays scattered across an organization’s systems, there’s a greater risk that it will be stolen or compromised in some way. Compliance with GDPR guidelines seeks to eliminate many of these risks. Though it will constitute a huge challenge for most website owners, the alternative is unacceptable. Hopefully, the new Office 365 GDPR Compliance Manager can take some of the confusion and apprehension out of the equation.