Manage your organization’s compliance requirements with greater convenience and ease

Organizations are expected to comply with a complex and ever evolving web of government policies, industry standards, and regional regulations, and cope with the increasing cost of potential non-compliance such as fines and non-compliant listings.

The requirements governing the collection and use of data are forever in evolution. There are hundreds of updates per day from thousands of regulatory bodies which organizations must comply with. Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager is a solution that helps you automatically assess and manage compliance across your multi-cloud environment.

Compliance Manager

The Compliance Manager solution help you throughout your compliance journey, from taking inventory of data protection risks to managing complexities of implementing controls, staying current with regulations and certifications, and reporting to auditors.

Simplifying compliance and reducing risk

Compliance Manager provides pre-built assessments for common industry and regional standards and regulations, or custom assessments to meet your unique compliance needs. Also, the solution provides workflow capabilities to help you efficiently complete your risk assessments through a single tool.

Furthermore, the solution provides a detailed step-by-step guidance on suggested improvement actions to help you comply with regulations and standards that are most relevant for your organization.

Moreover, the solution provides a risk-based compliance score to help you understand your compliance posture by measuring your organization’s progress in completing improvement actions.

Understanding your compliance score

The Compliance Manager overview page shows your organization’s current compliance score, helps you see what needs attention, and guides you to key improvement actions.

Compliance Manager awards you points for completing improvement actions taken to comply with a regulation, standard, or policy, and combines those points into an overall compliance score. Each action has a different impact on your score depending on the potential risks involved. Your compliance score can help prioritize which action to focus on to improve your overall compliance posture.

Key elements of Compliance Manager

Compliance Manager uses several data elements to help you manage your compliance activities. These key elements are: controls, assessments, regulations, and improvement actions.

A control is a requirement of a regulation, standard, or policy. It defines how you assess and manage system configuration, organizational process, and people responsible for meeting a specific requirement of a regulation, standard, or policy.

Elsewhere, an assessment is grouping of controls from a specific regulation, standard, or policy. Completing the actions within an assessment help you meet the requirements of a standard, regulation, or law. For example, you may have an assessment that, when you complete all actions within it, helps to bring your Microsoft 365 settings in line with ISO 27001 requirements.

About regulations, Compliance Manager provides over 360 regulatory templates to help you quickly create assessments. Examples of regulations are EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), Kenya Data Protection Act, and Uganda – The Data Protection and Privacy Act.

Finally, improvement actions provide recommended guidance that’s intended to help your organization align with data protection regulations and standards. The actions help centralize your compliance activities.

Conclusion

Government policies, industry standards, and regional regulations are ever evolving. Organizations are expected to keep pace with this constant evolution so as to avoid costs associated with potential non-compliance such as fines and non-compliant listings. Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager is a solution that eases organizations’ compliance journey. The solution achieves this by automatically assessing and managing compliance across your multi-cloud environment. It uses several data elements that include controls, assessments, regulations, and improvement actions to help you manage your compliance activities.