Why governance for Microsoft Teams?

Introduction

Organizations across the world are getting increasingly reliant on communication and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams for connecting their remote workforce. Thereby, regulating dispersed teams in a virtual workspace has presented a new set of challenges for business leaders.

For your organization to reap full benefits of MS Teams through strategized user adoption, it is vital to have appropriate governance in place. It ensures proactive data security across all organizational assets and networks.

Importance of Microsoft Teams governance

By default, Microsoft Teams allows any user to create teams. However, if not governed properly, this may lead to unwanted chaos and mismanagement.

Just imagine users, creating multiple teams without significant purpose, setting up processes inaccurately, or letting unauthorized users gain access to sensitive data. Such conduct is potentially harmful for your organization and hence, demands robust business controls to promote consistency in Teams and discard security vulnerabilities.

Planning your policies

While planning the policies and processes for your organization, consider the following questions to successfully strategize Teams governance –

• Does your organization need a specific naming convention for Teams?
• Does your organization need organizational specific classification to categorize teams?
• Does your organization need to restrain specific users to utilize certain Teams features?
• Does your organization need to restrain the rights and privileges of some teams?
• Does your organization need to limit the access of external collaborators or guests?

Steps to govern Microsoft Teams

Now, let us walk through the following aspects to design a framework for Microsoft Teams governance:

1. Creation and management of teams

Crucial to governance is the team creation process. Develop a permission model and assign privileges to users who can create teams to prevent the outgrowth and disorganization of teams. Establish procedures to categorize teams based on the department, division, or project they belong to, for easier management.

2. Control on external access

Interacting with guest users or external partners such as contractors and clients is an important facet of collaboration. However, exchange of confidential information with them poses security risks and hence, needs policies and procedures in place to limit their access for a better control.

3. Tracking information and user behavior

To ensure that sensitive corporate information is not leaked or misused while transit and users working remotely are focused and productive, setting up a procedure to gain real-time insights is important.

4. Lifecycle management of teams

To avoid teams sprawl and any type of clutter, you need to detect inactive, irrelevant or unnecessary teams. To centralize content management, teams must either be archived or disposed of according to your governance policies.

Automate Teams governance using TeamsHub by Cyclotron

Now we know that having governance in place helps to streamline the deployment of technologies and ensures a secure and compliant business. Thankfully, the structure of M365 environment is scalable because of its elasticity so that you can utilize its services to apply governance. Nevertheless, by using an automation tool such as TeamsHub by Cyclotron, you can derive a massive business value and benefits by empowering user self-service and efficient administration.

TeamsHub by Cyclotron extends MS Teams capabilities and automates governance to enhance overall productivity while ensuring security and compliance. Using TeamsHub by Cyclotron, you can experience an unparalleled collaboration by using a myriad of useful features. Some of them are as follows:

• Activate self-service for team creation and utilize dynamic forms, templates for automated workflows
• Classify teams using labels, tags, etc. and easily search content and create organization-specific or individual-specific hubs
• Manage the lifecycle of teams by enforcing expiration policies by archiving or deleting them when not in use
• Automate direct voice routing to bridge any voice calling gap in your organization
• Monitor user activities through real-time analytics to assess their performance
• Control external user access and maintain different levels of access
• Track files or documents shared with third-party contractors and revoke access on detecting any suspicious activity
• Automate custom site configuration as per a business use and requirement

Summary

With TeamsHub by Cyclotron, you can gain full control over your environment and preserve the integrity of your data. It offers you a user-friendly and unified interface for simplified governance so that you can execute all administrative processes from one single place without knowing complex PowerShell commands.

To explore more on various advantages that TeamsHub by Cyclotron offers, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo