Office 365 Data Governance

The questions that might arise to any enterprise would be, how safe our data will be over the cloud? Which data should we move and which we should not? Who will be taking care of my data once it is over the cloud? All these questions needed to be answered by the cloud provider to convince the enterprise to move over the cloud. The cloud providers do and should give better options to their clients about the size of data that should be moved over that cloud, the protection layers on it and who is going to monitor it. These questions and terms originate a general concept which we call it as Data Governance. It is the way to understand the actual meaning and sensitivity of the data to an enterprise.

Microsoft Office 365 has provided enterprises a great way to manage their data stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive which exclusive rules and policies which make that data quite secure. Like that, Office 365 has taken the sensitivity of enterprise’s data quite seriously that they had a make a separate application in Office 365 portal known and Security and Compliance Center which can be accessible directly by visiting that URL (https://protection.office.com) and signing in with Work or School account. Now let us drill down more in to Data Governance in these features listed below:

1.Import

 The import feature clearly imports the PST files (i.e. Outlook mail data) to Exchange Online mailboxes or you can even import your files into SharePoint Online sites of your organization. Not only the data you have for the organization, but it can also store third-party data like data from social media platforms and other documents and you can then apply the rules and policies to govern these kinds of data.

2. Archive

** **The Archive feature does what its name suggests. It makes an extra storage space to the mailbox of the user to save the historical messages. When it is activated, it automatically moves emails from user’s primary mailbox to the archived one after a specified period.

3. Retention Policies

 Using the Retention policies gives a strong hold to the data by applying the retention tags, deletion and preservation policies. The retention tags help in managing the lifecycle of the email messages to decide which email message should be brought under archived mailbox or should be deleted. Having said that, deletion policies are the policies that help the organization to decide which content should be removed after a certain time, located in SharePoint site collections while preservation policies are opposite to it. It helps in deciding which content should be safeguarded for any certain reasons. If the content is somehow deleted, Office 365 manages a copy of it.