Ensuring Privacy with Microsoft Priva

With so much personal data stored online today, privacy is a big concern both for individuals and for businesses in terms of compliance. Regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) apply beyond those borders and affect how organizations can store personal information, while giving consumers rights to manage how their data is collected. As with cybersecurity and a Zero Trust perspective that assumes breach, it’s wise to take a strong privacy stance, comprehensively providing privacy by default. Ensuring privacy with Microsoft Priva is one way to maintain these comprehensive standards.

Challenges in Maintaining Privacy

Organizations (and the internet in general) deal with continually increasing amounts of unstructured data. It’s more than people can keep up with. Sorting out which data is sensitive and understanding the potential risks involved in the types of personal data that companies store and share are just the beginning. Employees need training for proper data handling practices and for identifying problems in current workflows. They also need to fulfill data subject requests in a timely manner. With so much data to handle, manually processing it is slow and invites human error. Microsoft Priva reduces this burden and makes data privacy much more manageable.

Ensuring Privacy with Microsoft Priva: Two Ways to Simplify Management

There are two solutions available within Microsoft Priva, each of which targets specific challenges. Organizations can use one or both of these modules according to their particular needs.

Priva Privacy Risk Management

This is the part of Priva that brings visibility to an organization’s data and policies, thereby strengthening privacy and reducing risks of unsecured information. With this solution, administrators gain a much better view of the storage and movement of personal data within their organization. Key analytics and insights also help them understand any issues associated with their data flows and trends.

With Privacy Risk Management’s tools, you can proactively identify privacy risks and establish policies and processes for remediation. Users are directly notified about issues and given recommended actions to handle them. This empowers them to handle risk mitigation with confidence and accuracy. It enables them to clean up privacy issues they wouldn’t have known or thought about before: overexposed personal data, information that does not need to be retained, or the transfer of data across departments or borders. Customizable templates help establish policies for addressing these kinds of scenarios.

After your policies are set up, data can be continuously evaluated, alerts can be sent out when issues are detected, and remediation steps will be recommended.

Priva Subject Rights Requests

This is more help for the workflow side: it provides automation and tools for fulfilling data requests, saving employees time and safeguarding against error. When privacy law allows individuals to request to review or manage personal data about themselves that companies have collected, those data requests need to be fulfilled. With large amounts of unstructured data, finding and delivering the relevant information can be very time-consuming.

Priva Subject Rights Requests provides customizable workflows that can automate this process. A simple search for an individual will automatically collect data and allow you to review the findings and produce reports much more quickly. Workflows also allow teammates to collaborate in order to complete these requests efficiently.

Integration with Compliance Manager

Microsoft Priva is designed to integrate with Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, which offers data protection and privacy assessment templates that accord to various compliance rules and global industry standards. Working with Priva to improve workflows and strengthen privacy postures will boost your compliance score—and make your customers’ data more secure. That’s a double win in a crucial area of today’s information storage.

More on how data privacy has evolved over time: Data Privacy is Good Global Citizenship