Collaboration and remote working services were coming to the fore anyway but restrictions on travel, gatherings and limited presence in the office has hastened the implementation and increased the usage of these types of services. While they provide many usability benefits and have an inherent flexibility it is important to understand the potential risks with high usage.
One of the most popular collaboration suites is Microsoft Office 365 and in particular Microsoft Teams. There are a number of features that assist in the management and protection of Teams usage while still enjoying the many benefits.
Information Barriers - are policies that an admin can configure to prevent individuals or groups from communicating with each other. This is useful if, for example, one department is handling information that shouldn't be shared with other departments or a group needs to be prevented from communicating with anyone outside of that group.
Retention Policies - help you effectively manage the information in your organisation. Retention policies help you to keep data that's needed to comply with your organisation's internal policies, industry regulations, or legal needs, and to delete data that is not required.
Communication Compliance - helps minimise communication risks by helping you detect, capture, and act on inappropriate messages in your organisation.
Data Loss Prevention - capabilities take account of Microsoft Teams chat and channel messages, including private channel messages. You can define policies that prevent people from sharing sensitive information in a Microsoft Teams channel or chat session.
eDiscovery – enables Microsoft Teams content can be searched and used during investigations. All Microsoft Teams chats are journaled through to the respective mailboxes. Files uploaded in standard channels are covered under the eDiscovery functionality for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
Audit Log - can help you investigate specific activities across Microsoft 365 services, for example; team creation, team deletion, added channel and changed settings.
Risk Assessment – Innova provide external risk assessments which are a detailed, true-to-life report based on your company data, that reveals the vulnerabilities hackers will hunt for, including open access, sensitive data, permissions and passwords.
Conclusion
Even though Microsoft Teams is an excellent and powerful collaboration tool that can streamline communication, interaction and data sharing, it is critical to the security of the organisation that you maintain a level of control over its use. If you would like to know more about any of the issues raised in this article please don’t hesitate to contact us.
