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Today, more than ever, government organizations are facing increasing challenges associated with remote delivery of public services. The shift to support remote work has increased the need for government agencies to re-evaluate their security and compliance practices. Coupled with government employees accessing and sharing data remotely as well as collaborating in new ways using platforms like Microsoft Teams, government agencies need rich capabilities that help them efficiently discover relevant data. Public sector organizations are also under greater pressure to ensure they consistently meet industry compliance and security regulations. For example, many are required to respond quickly to Freedom of Information Act requests with relevant data.
Today we are excited to announce Advanced eDiscovery and Advanced Audit capabilities in Microsoft 365 are coming to Government Community Cloud (GCC), Government Community Cloud-High (GCC-H), and Department of Defense (DoD) environments. These new capabilities help organizations to efficiently respond to regulatory, legal, and forensic obligations with relevant data within the Microsoft 365 security and compliance boundary.
Discovering data where it lives with a more end–to–end eDiscovery solution
We often hear from customers that they are looking to reduce the complexity and cost of managing multiple solutions for their eDiscovery needs. In fact, according to Gartner, “by 2023, more than 70% of enterprise IT leaders will upgrade to an end-to-end e-discovery software.”
In April 2019, we delivered a new Advanced eDiscovery solution that supports the Electronic Discovery Reference Model by providing a more end-to-end workflow to identify, preserve, collect, process, review (early case assessment), and analyze data to help efficiently respond to legal and regulatory obligations or internal investigations.
To streamline the workflow, Advanced eDiscovery helps reduce the friction of identifying and collecting potential sources of relevant information by automatically mapping unique and shared data sources to the person of interest (custodian).
Additionally, native capabilities for Microsoft Teams, Yammer, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Exchange Online further enhance data discovery by reconstructing Teams conversations instead of returning individual messages, or including the attachment and link in emails and Teams chats consistently without additional configuration.
Advanced eDiscovery also supports hundreds of non-Office 365 file types out of the box, and data connectors support additional third-party data sources such as Bloomberg, Facebook, and many more.
Intelligent, machine learning capabilities also help reduce the burden of review that traditionally happens one document at a time. Advanced eDiscovery provides a broad set of intelligent capabilities to help customers reduce and reduce large volumes of data to a relevant set. For example, an automatically generated query helps filter only for unique content by identifying near duplicates, which can help dramatically reduce data. You can learn more about this and other Advanced eDiscovery capabilities here.
Powering your forensic investigations with Audit
To help government customers understand the scope of a data breach and effectively respond to their regulatory, legal and internal obligations, we are also releasing Advanced Audit. Advanced Audit helps customers with their forensic investigations by providing access to additional audit events that are important to forensic investigations, extending audit log retention for up to 1 year, and offering faster access to management activity API.
With the new event in Advanced Audit, that means customers can understand when mail data was accessed using the “MailItemsAccessed” event. This new auditing action helps investigators determine the scope of compromise by identifying the specific mail items that may been accessed by a malicious attacker. It also helps organizations to defensibly assert that a specific piece of mail data was not compromised.
We also often hear from customers that they want to easily access historical audit log activities to support their forensic investigations. In fact, according to Ponemon Research, they estimate that the average time to identify and contain a data breach takes around 6 months. To help organizations conduct forensic investigations on audit log data beyond the default 90–days audit retention period, with Advanced Audit organizations can apply retention policy to their audit log data for up to one year. You can learn more about this and other Advanced Audit capabilities here.
Our commitment to our government and public sector customers
Moving forward, we are committed to delivering more capabilities in the Government Community Cloud, Government Community Cloud-High, and Department of Defense to ensure government entities can benefit from the compliance and risk management features within Microsoft 365.
The new features in Advanced eDiscovery and Advanced Audit will start rolling out to customer’s government cloud tenants in the coming weeks. To learn how government organizations are using technology to secure apps, devices, and data, read the “Digital Transformation in Government” e-book available at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftGovPlaybook. You can also find more information on how to use Microsoft 365 Compliance features in this video
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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