Read time 3 minutes
Good governance is a wide platform that requires a great skill set and knowledge base for successful implementation. The concept of good governance is not only difficult to understand but more difficult to implement. It is an amalgamation of policies, procedures, roles, responsibilities, accountability, and rules that guide how the employees of the organization work.
Office 365 though an easily manageable cloud platform to store, manage and share data online can be utilized to its maximum potential only if the administrator is following a secured, and standard governance measures for successful and long-term working with the platform without any risks or related problems, The platform itself includes certain integrated features and facilities like retention period, sharing, archiving, access control, backup, restore, ownership, roles, and responsibilities for good data controlling activities while a good governance plan is required for uninterrupted working all the time.
Good Governance in Office 365
Governance is a practical methodology that applies everywhere. In the post, we will discuss governance in Office 365 and how good governance can be developed and implemented in Office 365. Handling Office 365 requires dealing with certain important to-do lists such as assigning the administrator rights, security concerns, important components, and many more.
Following are a few practices for the good governance of Office 365 which according to me are quite helpful because they can be implemented on a regular basis and are easy to adopt.
- Prioritize Your Requirement
Office 365 is a wide platform hence it is necessary first to understand the company’s requirements and then categorize the components of Office 365 in terms of its usage. In other words, you can add only those features that are intended to be used by the organization, and components that are not required can either be hidden or disabled.
- Once the components have been finalized as per the company’s needs, the next process to assign the administrative rights for the smooth working of Office 365 components. Some of the main responsibilities include:
- Assigning users for OneDrive, Skype, or other components.
- Providing login details to the user.
- Various rules for using Office 365 features.
- Annual renewal of the license.
- Corporate usage policies.
- Roles and responsibilities of administrative rights holder.
- Preventing Risk and Developing Security
After assigning the administrative rights, the next step is to define the security levels and analyze the various risks involved if in case there are any accidental deletions. All the components of Office 365 must be well aligned with some well-defined business perspective. All the usage policies and security levels must not be revealed to the user or administrator. Last-minute authenticity is necessary for the smooth functioning of the components as well as the company. Apart from this, some of the Office 365 features such as OneDrive and Skype hold the major business data and are hence more prone to malware, accidental deletions, and other risks of data loss. Therefore, a good governance plan demands keeping a regular Office 365 backup and Restore and manage risks aligned with the company’s current resources.
Final Words
Good governance of Office 365 is not confined only to these three points. It is a guiding plan that involves efficient management of the users as well as the organization so that they work hand in hand ensuring that no data loss takes place. Good governance involves creativity with simplicity involved in it. Even in the world of cloud-based technology, we still require a defined set of rules and principles for robust performance along with equivalent development through important measures like requirement prioritizations, administrative rights assignment, adding security solutions, and more to gain perfect governance in Office 365 environment.