Microsoft Teams Data Security and Archiving

Millions of employees have been working from home offices and other distant places since the COVID-19 epidemic began.

As a result, there’s a growing demand for online collaboration, putting Microsoft Teams on equal footing with Outlook, Word, and the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite of office productivity products as an indispensable tool for the modern workforce.

As users have flocked to Teams, compliance officers, information governance professionals, and other risk management decision-makers are asking whether they have access to the right archiving and data protection capabilities for the many data types produced within Microsoft Teams. While Microsoft provides certain native archiving and data protection features for Teams, third-party archiving and data protection solutions provide a variety of enhanced capabilities that allow businesses to completely comply with the compliance and privacy standards to which they are subject.

Collaboration Tools That Are Safe

Security and compliance experts point to issues including the increased number of conversations, documents, and other data records transferred by employees using MS Teams, all of which have become a prominent target for hackers.

Meanwhile, corporate legal officials are concerned that some of this data would be missed in e-discovery searches. Microsoft Teams users create a lot of “stuff”, but only a portion of it is collected by its own search and archiving tools. The following are some examples of content kinds that are frequently overlooked:

  • Meetings and phone conversations are recorded.
  • Messages in Teams chat and channels have been edited.
  • Heart symbols and thumbs-up signals are examples of emojis and graphical chat reactions.
  • Microsoft Planner entries for meetings and tasks.
  • Microsoft Whiteboard allows you to share drawings, notes, and text.
  • Webcam screen-sharing and other interactions.

A rising number of enterprises that rely on Teams are resorting to third-party solutions to collect this material and compensate for other inadequacies in MS 365’s security and archiving features.

Final Thoughts

While Microsoft Teams’ archiving and data management capabilities give some protection, many businesses want a more comprehensive set of data security measures. These functionalities may be provided by third-party solutions, reducing the danger of a corporate data breach and ensuring that businesses are ready to satisfy all legal and regulatory obligations. Contact JENLOR today to begin extending your IT security strategy into Microsoft Teams.