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(VOICES OF DATA PROTECTION – Episode 5)
Host: Bhavanesh Rengarajan – Principal Program Manager, Microsoft
Guest: Mavi Etzyon-Grizer – Director of Information Protection, Security & Compliance Customer Experience Team, Microsoft
The following conversation is adapted from transcripts of Episode 5 of the Voices of Data Protection podcast. There may be slight edits in order to make this conversation easier for readers to follow along.
This podcast features the leaders, program managers from Microsoft and experts from the industry to share details about the latest solutions and processes to help you manage your data, keep it safe and stay compliant. If you prefer to listen to the audio of this podcast instead, please visit: aka.ms/voicesofdataprotection
BHAVANESH: Welcome to Voices of Data Protection. I’m your host, Bhavanesh Rengarajan, and I’m a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft.
So, Mavi, why don’t you give a quick introduction about yourself?
MAVI: Hey, Bhavy, super excited to be here. My name is Mavi, and I lead the Microsoft Information Protection and Security and Compliance Customer Experience team. My team helps customers deploy and use our security and compliance products, and they are spread all over the world just ready to help our customers use our products.
BHAVANESH: So, Mavi, I’ve been talking to a few of my colleagues here at Microsoft, and I hear that you’ve not done a good job at all. What you’ve done is a great job. Why don’t you talk about your program to bring our audience up to speed?
MAVI: We’re in our first-year anniversary, right now. We did private previews, we did a lot of webinars, we did a lot of community blogs. We help customers deploy. We’re doing video blogs. We’re doing so many things just to help our customers understand the benefits of our solutions, and how they can go ahead today and deploy, it in super easy steps such as one, two, three, and that’s it.
BHAVANESH: If you have to summarize your top three achievements as a team, over the last one year, and basically, I would like to issue for your first anniversary, over here, the team. So, what would those three big achievements be?
MAVI: I would say number one would be basically having the team well recognized, you know, inside and outside Microsoft as the leader in deploying our security and compliance solutions. Second thing is the technical depth and understanding that the team has. This is a huge, huge win, because you know we spent so many hours in understanding how our products work to help our customers benefit and help them deploy. And the third is everything that we’re doing to benefit the customers. We’re the voice of the customer within engineering. So, we are channeling all the feedback, back to engineering, and we help that build a better product that will both benefit Microsoft, but also our customers.
BHAVANESH: That’s good. What do you think are the things that you’ve done really well, over the last six months or so, in your team?
MAVI: Really well, are all the video blogs, webinars, and blogs that we made, all of the presentations we gave at RSA, Ignite, and other internal and external events at Microsoft. I think we did this very, very well. And also, we’re able to identify the use cases for customers and help them build a policy to match their use cases specifically.
BHAVANESH: I have also heard that you know, you do something called a Customer Learning Day. Can you talk about that a bit? I’m pretty sure a lot of our customers or partners would want to feature that.
MAVI: What a great question, Bhavi, thank you. On Customer Learning Day, we give our customers the opportunity to talk to our leadership in Microsoft, share their good, the bad, the ugly, and you know, we’re not looking for lovey-dovey conversation. It’s more of a constructive feedback on what Microsoft did well, but also, we’re interested in learning what we didn’t do very well, and what we could do to improve and help our customers deploy.
This is basically two days where customers get the perfect opportunity to talk to our leadership team and share their use cases, experiences, and also roadmap, and where they’re headed, and how we, at Microsoft, what we can do to help them.
BHAVANESH: Mavi, is there a way in which our customers can reach out to you and your team? Do you run some sort of sessions or consortiums where you can have these offline conversations and try to bubble these things up in the right engineering leaders?
MAVI: These Customer Learning Days happen twice a year, but if there’s a specific customer that we see that has a very interesting deployment story or has very constructive or focused feedback on things that we’re doing, then we will always make sure that someone from either leadership or engineering would be meeting with that customer. The case, then yeah, we’ll obviously reach out and make sure that this will happen.
BHAVANESH: Wow, that’s great. What are all the various solution that your team caters to?
MAVI: We have like four pillars in my team. One is information protection. That is all the information protection and DLP area. The other one is information governance. That’s all the records management that we’re doing. Third is discover and respond. That is the best discovery that we have in the events audit pillar. And last but not least, is the insider risk and communication compliance section, which we’re helping organizations protect their data from inside and also outside threats.
BHAVANESH: And where do you see a lot of updates across the solutions, if you want to rank and say, well, here is where I see a lot of customers interested in, what would that be?
MAVI: I can tell you that insider risk has a huge growing interest in that area, but also in our new endpoint DLP (data loss prevention) solution, and in our team DLP. So, those three areas combining obviously, with our – with our other pillars, such as information protection, all together, this has a huge interest with our customers.
BHAVANESH: And I would definitely suggest our audience to watch all your webinars. Let me ask you this tough question, Mavi. So, what do you think you and your team have done differently over the last six months?
MAVI: If I really had to think about this, I think we need to create more end-to-end stories to share with customers, so they can see the value, you know, for the whole compliance story and benefit from it. Because I think what we’re doing is we’re focusing just on information protection, or just information governance. But if we can tie the story as an end to end, that would resonate more with our customer, and this is something that I asked the team to focus on in the next few months, so customers, when they come to deploy our solutions, they will have the whole story and even understand, you know, where to start from, what to do what’s coming next, how to plan for that. This is something that I think we should have done in the last six months, but we’re going to focus it in the next six months.
BHAVANESH: And I remember one of our conversation, Mavi. This was like a few months ago, wherein you also resonated saying that having some sort of an onboarding mechanism for customers would make a lot of sense, because a lot of our customers are in different points in their journey, on be it information protection or information governance. So, we do not do a great job of tying those pieces of puzzle together. Do you want to share your thoughts?
MAVI: What we found out is customers, they say, hey, you have this great solution, but help us out, tell us where to start. They come to our Security and Compliance Center; they’re overwhelmed with the amount of data that we’re showing them. And they just want our help, learning how to onboard, what to do, what’s coming up next, and the thought that we had was helping them out in a very intuitive way. They can go ahead and just enable some policies and benefit from the products they already own.
BHAVANESH: Okay, I think the way in which I would draw similarities is very – very much in context to how we have these taxation tools, right. And we all do not understand taxes to the same extent, but then these tools really help us efficiently file our taxes every single year.
MAVI: Yes, exactly.
BHAVANESH: Yeah. Let’s now head into the quick-fire section, Mavi. So, I’m going to just ask you a few of these questions, and whatever comes to your mind. Customer?
MAVI: Obsession.
BHAVANESH: Partner?
MAVI: We’re in this together.
BHAVANESH: Roadmap?
MAVI: The way to success.
BHAVANESH: And what’s success?
MAVI: No limits.
BHAVANESH: And failure?
MAVI: Never heard that word before.
BHAVANESH: Okay, I was actually expecting you to say something like that. It’s not in my dictionary or something. I think that’s about it. Is there anything else that you want to convey to our audience now?
MAVI: Yeah. I want to encourage our audience. You know, sometimes all of our security products are so overwhelming, and they don’t know where to start or what to do. Sometimes they’re busy and want to first have all the solutions, and then start thinking about what to do. No, no. You start doing whatever you already own. Because building that first layer of security is actually the first step to ensure that your data is safe and protected.
BHAVANESH: And Mavi, is there any specific link that they can go to, to read about you and your team?
MAVI: We post all our blogs at aka.ms/mipscce/techcommunity. That’s a great place for resources, and for all our webinars that we’re doing, it’s at aka.ms/mipscce/webinars, so there they can see the previous webinars and all our future webinars.
To learn more about this episode of the Voices of Data Protection podcast, visit: https://aka.ms/voicesofdataprotection.
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Keep in touch with Bhavanesh on LinkedIn.
Keep in touch with Mavi on LinkedIn.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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