Ensure Office 365 Security and Compliance and Pass Audits

Is streamlining Office 365 security and compliance important to your organization? Do you constantly think about how you can better secure your data and make your Office 365 compliance checks less painful? Are you on the lookout for ways to spot and block threats before they lead to breaches or costly fines?

Proving to auditors that your corporate security policies align with industry regulatory requirements can be a nightmare — you’ll see too much of your valuable time spent generating the just right report to address auditors’ requests, manually searching for the answers to questions, and figuring out how to securely retain log data in case it might be needed later while ensuring you still have easy access to it. It’s all about fetching the exact information that compliance auditors want to see. The faster you can deliver this information, the better.

Proving your Office 365 compliance with native reporting tools

To establish strong security and compliance of the Office 365 environment in fully alignment with government or industry standard requirements, you can start by leveraging the capabilities of the built-in features offered by Office 365. The Office 365 Security and Compliance Center enables you to:

• Get a wide variety of reports, from audit reports showing sign-ins for SharePoint, Exchange Online, and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), to reports about device management and data loss prevention.
• Search for the content you need with Office 365 Compliance Search.
• Gain control over permissions by assigning access to the people who perform compliance tasks.
• Get notified when users perform specific activities in Office 365 by setting up activity alerts.
• Archive mailbox content for future eDiscovery.

But while these native features offer valuable functionality, they lack vital capabilities required to make audit checks less stressful:

• To demonstrate that you have established and maintained security controls, you need to keep your audit trail secured for several years, as many compliance regulations require. On top of that, you need to be able to easily and quickly access this audit data when an auditor asks for evidence. Office 365 Security and Compliance Center is able to retain your logs for only 90 days; older logs are automatically deleted, wiping out audit data that you might need and may actually be required to retain.
• Office 365 Security and Compliance Center has no built-in compliance reports already mapped to common regulatory standards such as PCI DSS, SOX and HIPAA, so you have to waste your precious time diving deep into the requirements of each regulation. Plus, you have to generate the reports each time you need them, because you can’t subscribe to them.
• When you spot suspicious activity and need to investigate it, or an auditor asks you a specific question that you need to address immediately, you won’t be able to search for specific audit data, because the Compliance Search enables you to browse through content only.

Saving time and effort while ensuring Office 365 compliance with Netwrix Auditor

If you are nervous about your next Office 365 HIPAA compliance check or any other audit and need reliable ways to mitigate the risk of privacy and security violation across your Office 365, Netwrix has you covered.

Netwrix Auditor delivers pervasive transparency into user activity across SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business, enabling you to streamline compliance reporting and optimize search for audit data across Office 365. The application tracks and reports on changes to configuration, security and content, as well as on data access across all your SharePoint Online farms, including OneDrive for Business site collections. Plus, it delivers actionable intelligence on administrative changes made to your Exchange Online organization, and helps you establish control over non-owner mailbox access. Having all this audit data at your fingertips helps you effectively bridge the gap between organizational policies and regulatory compliance requirements on the one hand and real-world user behavior on the other.

The benefits go far beyond what native functionality has to offer, enabling you to:

• Save time preparing for your next audit check with predefined reports, including pre-built compliance reports mapped to the most popular regulatory standards, including CJIS, FERPA, FISMA/NIST, GDPR, GLBA, HIPAA, ISO/IEC 27001, PCI DSS and SOX.
• Identify potential risks faster by subscribing to the reports that you need most and having them delivered automatically on the schedule you specify.
• Optimize investigations by quickly drilling down into the audit data to get to the root cause of abnormal activity in minutes with the Google-like interactive search.
• Sleep tight at night by configuring custom alerts on threat patterns across your Office 365 environment.
• Keep your consolidated SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business logs securely for over 10 years in the cost-effective two-tiered storage (SQL database + file-based) and access them easily during your next audit check.