Microsoft Compliance Manager Overview
In this, we will get a detailed overview of Microsoft Compliance Manager.
Microsoft Compliance Manager is a feature in the Microsoft 365 compliance center that helps you manage your organization’s compliance requirements with greater ease and convenience. Moreover, this can help you throughout your compliance journey,
- Firstly, from taking inventory of your data protection risks to managing the complexities of implementing controls
- Secondly, for staying current with regulations and certifications
- Lastly, for reporting to auditors.
Further, Compliance Manager helps simplify compliance and reduce risk by providing:
- Firstly, Pre-built assessments for common industry and regional standards and regulations, or custom assessments to meet your unique compliance needs.
- Secondly, workflow capabilities to help you efficiently complete your risk assessments through a single tool.
- Thirdly, step-by-step guidance on improvement actions to help you comply with the standards and regulations that are most relevant for your organization.
- Lastly, a risk-based compliance score helps you understand your compliance posture by measuring your progress in completing improvement actions.
Key elements: controls, assessments, templates, improvement actions
Compliance Manager uses several data elements to help you manage your compliance activities. The key elements are:
1. Controls
A control is a requirement of regulation, standard, or policy. It defines how you assess and manage system configuration, organizational process, and people responsible for meeting a specific requirement of regulation, standard, or policy. However, the Compliance Manager tracks the following types of controls:
- Firstly, Microsoft managed controls.
- Secondly, Your controls or customer-managed controls.
- Lastly, Shared control.
2. Assessments
An assessment is a grouping of controls from a specific regulation, standard, or policy. Completing the actions within an assessment help you meet the requirements of a standard, regulation, or law. However, assessments have several components:
- Firstly, in-scope services
- Secondly, Microsoft managed controls
- Thirdly, Your controls or customer-managed controls
- Then, Shared controls
- Lastly, the Assessment score
3. Templates
Compliance Manager provides templates to help you quickly create assessments. You can modify these templates to create an assessment optimized for your needs. You can also build a custom assessment by creating a template with your own controls and actions. For example, you may want a template to cover an internal business process control, or a regional data protection standard that isn’t covered by one of our 325+ pre-built assessment templates.
4. Improvement actions
Improvement actions help centralize your compliance activities. Each improvement action provides recommended guidance that’s intended to help you align with data protection regulations and standards. Improvement actions can be assigned to users in your organization to perform implementation and testing work. You can also store documentation, notes, and record status updates within the improvement action.
Reference: Microsoft Documentation