Microsoft 365 environments nowadays contain allot of information and data. But how do you manage all this data? How do you apply the correct mechanisms to protect all this data? Microsoft Information Governance (MIG) helps organizations govern their data for compliance and regulatory reasons.
To help organizations understand what they can do to actually govern their data, they would actually need to know what is available to them. The following image actually helps to give an overview of how the solutions are built up in Microsoft 365 environments.
The following focus area’s can de derived from the image above:
Information governance – Mostly focused on the lifecycle off data. You can define retention policies (how long do you want to maintain data) and make sure your stale or inactive data is managed properly. Like for example archiving your mailboxes.
Records management – This is mainly focused on managing regulatory, legal, and business-critical records. It allows organizations to manage their legal obligations, provides the ability to demonstrate compliance with regulations, and increases efficiency with regular disposition of items that are no longer required to be retained.
Connectors of 3rd party data – this feature uses data connectors to import and archive non-Microsoft, third-party data from social media platforms, instant messaging platforms, and document collaboration platforms, to mailboxes in your Microsoft 365 organization. By doing so this allows and organization to apply various Microsoft 365 compliance solutions to the data after it’s been imported.
You also see an overlap in the image above. Namely retention and deletion actions. From each perspective (Information governance, records management and data connectors) you would need to apply retention policies and have deletion actions as data is no longer needed.
Keep an eye out for my next blogs, about these topics as I will go more into detail about these topics.