AvePoint’s New Data Access Governance Solution Brings “Policies and Insights” To Office 365 Sharing

Policies and Insights (PI) allows organizations to prevent exposure of sensitive content

Jersey City, N.J., October 6, 2020—AvePoint, the leading digital transformation company and five-time Microsoft Partner of the year, announced today the general availability of its Policies and Insights (PI) Software-as-a-Service solution, the only solution that monitors sensitive content exposure across Microsoft 365 and proactively enforces policies to prevent data oversharing.

“Risk is a combination of data sensitivity and exposure levels, but to get that information in Office 365 you need to comb through multiple unconnected reports that contain tens of thousands of un-prioritized line items,” said John Hodges, Vice President of Product Strategy, AvePoint. “We take those separate feeds and stitch a story together about a specific user and how many times they have accessed a file with sensitive information over a period of time.”

These security features in AvePoint’s PI (pronounced like the mathematical symbol π) have never been more important than today thanks to the dramatic increase in remote work and sharing on digital platforms. Companies and their employees must strike a careful balance between access and security, remote capabilities and properly secured networks and data. This is why the release of PI at this particular time is so important to remote-access workers and absolutely vital to the companies employing them.

Today, many platforms, such as Microsoft 365, enable end-users to share and grant others access to data from multiple locations such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint or even the file itself. This flexibility may be great for efficiency and collaboration, but it can also make it easy for users to accidentally share information too broadly, and difficult for IT teams to determine who has access to sensitive data, and even where a breach has occurred.

Organizations need a single source of truth to monitor closely who has access to files with sensitive content in Microsoft 365 not only to prevent data leaks but also to pass regulatory audits.

PI leverages functionality within Microsoft’s Security and Compliance Center to create prioritized insights on content that may be over-exposed and require immediate attention. Importantly, PI users can take the insights gleamed from the platform and create automated policies, preventing the overexposure of sensitive content. Prebuilt policies include:

• Preventing shadow users who can see files but are not members or owners of the Sites, Groups or Teams in which files are shared
• Reverting unapproved Site, Group, Team ownership or membership changes
• Membership/ownership restriction
• Membership/ownership size
• Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive access request settings
• Deletion restrictions
• Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive external sharing settings

“A tremendous amount of PI’s value comes not just from being able to see oversharing behaviors, but in being able to automatically revert those actions at a granular level—without preventing productive, compliant sharing—and send a notification to the internal user as to why it took action,” said Hodges.

PI is globally available for managed service providers (MSPs) to resell and protect the data within multiple Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) tenants through Tech Data StreamOne Solutions Sore, Ingram Micro Cloud marketplace and Synnex Stellr marketplace.

“Managed Service Providers that are looking to build a premium security service for Microsoft 365 and Teams, provide added value to their customers and increase their Microsoft related monthly reoccurring revenue need to evaluate PI,” said Scott Sacket, Senior Vice President of Business Development, AvePoint.

Interested parties can request a demo or trial the solution at https://www.avepoint.com/products/cloud/policies-insights-microsoft-365

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