Online collaboration with Microsoft Teams is powerful, especially through the past few years when remote work environments became the norm. However, with the acceleration of online collaboration, the production and growth of data over this time has been untameable.
As communication and collaboration are at the heart of every organization, tools like Microsoft Teams act as a habitat for critical information, documents, and other company material. In addition, Microsoft Teams’ seamless integration with SharePoint, Outlook, and OneDrive, making it the primary medium for file sharing and meetings.
The high velocity of communication and collaboration can translate into poor Microsoft Teams security practices, such as unauthorized or accidental sharing of data. Thus, it becomes necessary to ensure that a platform as popular as Microsoft Teams is secure and protects data integrity. With so many people relying on MS Teams' compliance abilities, it is crucial to understand how secure Microsoft Teams really is and steps you can take to ensure better practices to keep your important business information complaint and secure.
Microsoft Teams Security Standards
All Microsoft 365 suite products are classified into four compliance categories; Microsoft Teams falls under Category C, implying that compliance obligations are enabled by default. This further establishes MS Teams compliance with several regulatory standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 27018, HIPAA Business, EU Model Clauses (EUMC) and others.
Besides the categorization, there are several out-of-the-box features built to help businesses maintain a compliant collaboration environment, like information barriers, communication compliance, data loss prevention, retention policies, eDiscovery, and others
Keeping Microsoft Teams Compliant with In-Built Features
To ensure content protection across the Microsoft Teams ecosystem, an organization must establish information protection architecture so that your data stays trackable, protected, and compliant. Let us help you tighten the security loopholes and meet the compliance and litigation requirements with insights on how to make the most of existing MS Teams compliance functionalities:
1. Sensitivity Labels
The in-built Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity labels enable the classification and protection of your Microsoft Teams data. Enable the creation and definition of sensitivity labels a requirement, to ensure all your “secret” data is encrypted. These labels help you configure the privacy of teams, control external sharing, manage access from unmanaged devices, and, arguably most important to Microsoft Teams security, manage guess access.
2. Data Retention Policies
On one hand, you can create retention policies that specify when to store Microsoft Teams data to stay compliant with business, regulatory or litigation requirements. On the other hand, you can also use retention policies to manage the removal of data that is no longer needed. Apply retention policies to your entire organization, specific teams, or users to store the data for a specified period before deletion or to be stored elsewhere. Unrequired information can simply be moved to OneDrive or SharePoint once the retention period is over to free up space in Microsoft Teams.
3. Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
This feature detects and blocks user access to malicious content in Microsoft Teams. ATP also wards off unsafe files in platforms that dominate the file storage and file sharing services in
Microsoft Teams, like SharePoint and OneDrive. Therefore, you must make sure to turn on ATP for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams.
4. Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
