UPDATED 21:13 EDT / FEBRUARY 22 2018

BIG DATA

Microsoft releases data protection tools to ensure compliance with EU’s GDPR rules

With less than 90 days on the clock until the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, Microsoft Corp. today released a couple of new data protection and compliance tools for some of its most popular enterprise products.

The new tools are designed to help enterprises ensure they adhere to the EU’s new rules. GDPR sets new standards for how companies are supposed to store and use the personally identifiable information of EU citizens. The rules apply to any company that’s based in the EU, in addition to those that collect and use the data of EU residents.

First up is Microsoft Compliance Manager, which is now generally available following a beta testing phase. Working with Microsoft’s Azure cloud, Office 365 and Dynamics 365, it’s designed to ensure that an organizations’ data in those services is all in order.

“Compliance Manager really adds great additional value for Microsoft Cloud services by providing insights on the relationships between regulation, processes, and technology,” said Nick Postma, an information technology manager at Dutch healthcare firm Abrona, which helped test Compliance Manager during the beta phase.

Compliance Manager is used to generate what’s called a “Compliance Score” for each Microsoft cloud service an organization uses. In a blog post, Microsoft said customers can perform “ongoing risk assessments on Microsoft Cloud services with a risk-based score reference, giving you visibility into your compliance performance.”

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Microsoft said customers can improve their compliance score to an acceptable standard by implementing new levels of control for the data they work with. Compliance Manager is available for Office 365 now, and will come to other cloud services “soon.”

The second tool released today is the Azure Information Protection scanner, which allows customers to create policies to discover and classify documents that don’t comply with GDPR standards. The idea is to let users easily see which files need additional protections in place to stay compliant.

“We’re also going to expand sensitive data types to include a GDPR template to consolidate sensitive data types into a single template,” Microsoft said. This will enable customers to detect and classify personal data relevant to GDPR more easily, so they can address any issues before the new rules go into effect.

Image: Harakir/pixabay

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