Office 365 and Regulatory Compliance

legal document management solution that allows firms to share and organize documents and emails. It was designed to comply with ISO 27001 and HIPAA standards and lets users customize permission settings.

Financial firms can rely on Office 365’s Security & Compliance Center, Advanced Security Management, Advanced Data Governance, Advanced eDiscovery and other apps to minimize the risk of exposing private information.

In healthcare, users can leverage a HIPAA-compliant Office 365 setup, using industry-based templates to create usage policies to prevent data loss.

Office 365 also offers basic security features like two-factor authentication that secure communications and comply with these types of requirements.

MSPs can help clients ensure that their Office 365 setup meets their industry’s basic security and privacy standards across all regions. But native features alone are not enough.

According to the Barracuda study, 67% of respondents rely solely on built-in Office 365 capabilities for backup and recovery, despite the complexity of retention policies and the fact that native tools do not provide granular restoration.

Third-party tools like Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup and email protection products can provide the data security and compliance that these companies want and need. According to the report, 84% said that having a backup solution with unlimited storage was necessary, and 77% indicated that granular restore capabilities for Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams was vital. Those features are only possible with the deployment of a third-party solution.

Protecting Office 365 data is a rapidly growing requirement, and organizations need comprehensive, easy-to-use backup solutions to ensure they remain in compliance with industry and government regulators. Organizations want granular retention, the ability to recover user mailboxes to other locations or users, and role-based access control. However, many of them still rely on Microsoft’s native retention, which doesn’t offer such capabilities.

MSPs can help by guiding customers through configuring Office 365 to meet the security and compliance needs of their specific industry. They can also help by providing access to third-party data backup and recovery tools that provide the functionality clients need to successfully back up and restore data and applications in the event of a failure or cyber-attack.

Brian Babineau is Senior Vice President and General Manager for Barracuda MSP. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s managed services business, a dedicated team focused on enabling partners to easily deliver affordable IT solutions to customers.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.