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AvePoint Compliance Solutions

AvePoint Compliance Solutions

AvePoint Compliance Solutions

Defining Governance, Risk, and Compliance in Terms of AvePoint Compliance Solutions

Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are hot topics today for organizations in our technology-driven environment. Regardless of the line of business or systems used to collaborate, it is important to understand who is using your content; what they are using it for; and what standards (e.g. privacy, information security, accessibility, site quality, and retention) are required by law, statute, or internal policy.

Enterprise organizations now face an explosion of data and communication, creating a greater need to collaborate and share information while maintaining strict compliance with regulatory requirements and management of sensitive data.

AvePoint Compliance Solutions provide organizations with the tools to gain a truly detailed analysis of sensitive content within their environments along with the entire context around that information to conduct real-time threat assessments and mitigate the likelihood of a breach or data leak, ensuring organizations can support a wide range of accessibility, privacy, operational security (OpSec) and sensitive security information (SSI), and site quality requirements. AvePoint Compliance Solutions help organizations ensure information is available and accessible to the people who should have it and protected from the people who should not.

Learn more about AvePoint Compliance Solutions for Accessibility Compliance , Operational Security and Sensitive Security Information Compliance , Privacy Compliance , and Site Quality Compliance .

Assessing Risk in a Complicated Landscape

Organizations now face increasing pressures to do more with less as well as empower employees, associates, and customers with the latest technologies. Enterprise collaboration systems, social media, mobile devices, and cloud solutions can help promote innovation, free thinking, and creativity, but they also drastically increase content and create a new set of compliance challenges.

The trend toward big data presents an increased level of risk ( Gartner estimates that enterprise data will grow 650 percent by 2015). At the same time, accidental data exposure, privacy breaches, loss of secure data and intellectual property, and exposure of personal information is on the rise, resulting in a greater emphasis on governance and risk reporting.

Consequences of ignoring risk are costly. Organizations may be subject to significant financial penalties and fines , stringent government oversight , legal or regulatory consequences , and even damage to their brand and reputation.

Additional Regulations and Mandates

Added pressure comes from regulatory, statutory, and organizational compliance mandates that require standards for protecting intellectual property, trade secrets, personally identifiable information (PII), and sensitive customer information as well as meeting legal obligations, ensuring system reliability, performing risk assessments, and more.

Organizations must comply with a wide range of statutory, regulatory, and organization-specific requirements that typically fall into the following categories (click on each icon for more information):

Accessibility Compliance

The Internet has fundamentally transformed how organizations worldwide communicate, publish, and find information. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies provide information, collaboration, communication, and e-commerce systems through the Web that are incorporated into our lives and work. While this technology has created new opportunities for global communication and commerce, it has also created new challenges. Today, web sites serve as the public facing “storefront” and also the internal work-space for many organizations. As such, these systems must accurately represent and reflect company standards, legal statutes, and adhere to increasingly stringent regulations and legislation around the world. Accessibility statutes like Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments in the United States, as well as the World Wide Web (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), have been codified and mandated for worldwide public sector and private organizations. Organizations must comply with such regulations and guidelines to ensure their IT systems are accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Operational Security and Sensitive Security Information Compliance

While the Internet has transformed the way individuals live, work, and communicate, information placed on the Web or within internal systems can create operational and security gaps that could put assets at risk. Troop movement, dignitary visits, power plant schematics, bio hazards, diseases, border information, financial information, or an improper address and phone number may create security issues that could be taken advantage of by a third party as well as create unintended consequences for potential National Security threats and/or terrorist activities. The potential for inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information continues to grow. Using search engines and information compilation algorithms, a single user can aggregate, analyze, and construct new levels of understanding from unclassified sources.

Privacy Compliance

Worldwide public sector organizations, public companies, enterprises in highly regulated industries, and even small-and-midsized businesses may be subject to a range of privacy and information security requirements. Privacy is a major concern of any organization that handles personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI). Corporations and government agencies are also concerned with data and information security of confidential information including corporate trade secrets as well as merger and acquisition information. This is a very real threat to every company, not just those specializing in PII or PHI. A fundamental tenant of virtually all compliance programs is the principle that private or sensitive information must be available only to people that have a right to access it, and subsequently protected from those who do not. Private information in the wrong hands exposes organizations to significant financial risk through regulator fines or through severely damaging a company’s reputability and brand equity.

Site Quality Compliance

The expansion of online commerce and global communication has created new challenges for organizations that do not have appropriate tools in place to monitor site quality and performance. Rapidly changing content can present a difficult task for any IT professional who must ensure that the structural integrity of their enterprise Web site is maintained. Growing organizations often do not have the IT and personnel resources to address these challenges. However, business opportunities can be lost without implementing an enterprise-wide site quality solution because web sites containing broken links, missing images, and slow-loading pages can create a negative experience for end-users.

Requirements include, but are not limited to:

  • Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
  • The Privacy Act of 1974
  • Section 208 of the E-Government Act
  • The Federal Information Security Management Act
  • Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
  • Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA)
  • DoD OPSEC Requirements
  • Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments
  • World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
  • DoD 5015.2, Sarbanes Oxley

Additionally, there are regional-specific data protection and privacy mandates, such as:

  • European Union Data Protection Directive
  • Asia Pacific Privacy Framework
  • Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA or PIPED)

Understanding Compliance Concerns Throughout Your Organization

Implementing and enforcing compliance initiatives to support accessibility, operational security and sensitive security information, privacy, and site quality requirements not only affect an organization’s compliance personnel, it also affects IT and all business users, requiring significant attention from the organization as a whole. A good compliance program includes participation from many stakeholders, and integrates people and policy with technical solutions and enforceable rules.

Organizations must understand what content is shared and balance the open exchange of information with “need to know” standards.

  • How do we prevent exposure across the enterprise?
  • How do we detect problems and understand how our content is being used?
  • How do we track usage and classification throughout the content lifecycle?
  • How do we respond and resolve compliance issues using a common, universal language?

Conflicting Organizational Interests

Competing interests within departments or groups is a common challenge. IT must keep track of increasingly complex content storage, compliance officers are struggling under the burden of managing the risk across business environments, and company executives want to embrace innovation and the latest technologies for internal and external collaboration.

Conflicting Organizational Interests between Business, Compliance, and IT departments: Justification, Boundaries, and Possibilities

Not only do business, IT, and compliance departments have conflicting opinions about how content is managed and who should manage it, but many organizations allow departments to independently control their content and use different software, report formats, and archiving systems in order to offer creative control. Separate departments often have no common system of managing content and no way of determining their current state of compliance.

Gathering Stakeholders

Many factors go into the determination of an organization’s privacy and information assurance, including statutory and regulatory requirements, organizational best practices, and market demands. In a perfect world, each and every IT deployment would be accompanied by a governance and compliance strategy, a comprehensive plan for technical, practical, and strategic implementation, and scheduled monitoring of that plan.

AvePoint Compliance Solutions

Decoding Compliance Needs with AvePoint

Whether you are a business user, a compliance officer, or an IT administrator, you have accountability over what content is created in your enterprise and who sees it.

Effective compliance strategies allow the business to thrive while still maintaining effective IT boundaries and controls. In order to prevent risk, these strategies must be easily standardized, monitored, and adopted throughout an organization. Just as the Rosetta Stone was historically used to translate, interpret, and decode languages, AvePoint Compliance Solutions serve as a universal translator allowing compliance officers, IT administrators, and business users to utilize the same automated system to receive information and assess their organization’s current state of compliance, in a language they can understand.

AvePoint is the only solutions provider that can offer a truly holistic view of the security and compliance posture. Our risk management system utilizes a distributive governance approach that helps stitch together conflicting organizational repositories into an enterprise-wide solution. This allows organizations to ensure that information is available to the people who should have it and protected from the people who should not. Our tools automate access and controls enterprise-wide to mitigate the likelihood of a catastrophic incident while establishing a comprehensive program that not only reflects the priorities of the business, but also implements practices, procedures, and protection.

AvePoint Compliance Solutions Components

  • Our Model
  • At a Glance
  • A Closer Look

AvePoint Compliance Solutions Model

AvePoint Compliance Solutions Model: Prevent, Detect, Track, Respond and Resolve
Prevent Proactive policy enforcement and automation to control access, direct content, and prevent content leaks and misuse.
Detect Quick detection of events, if and when compliance infractions occur.
Track Complete investigations with knowledge of who, what, when, where, why, and how a breach occurs.
Respond & Resolve Quick corrective action including legal holds, archiving and removing content from unprotected areas, and restructuring access to prevent the likelihood of a future breach.

AvePoint Compliance Solutions – At a Glance

We enable organizations to:

  • Perform automated scans and risk assessments to reveal, evaluate, and classify key content throughout the enterprise
  • Enable control and confidentiality of sensitive content through tagging, classification and automation of security, access and identity management, and retention
  • Balance accessibility and security
  • Maintain integrity of content throughout its lifecycle with information assurance
  • Monitor privacy with detailed auditing and reporting
  • Discover how content is being used and by whom
  • Reduce strain on compliance resources and personnel
  • Establish a successful risk management program

AvePoint Compliance Solutions – A Closer Look

To discover how AvePoint Compliance Solutions specifically address various regulatory or internal policies, please select a policy area below.

To support each of these policy areas, AvePoint Compliance Solutions provide organizations with key components to establish an effective risk management lifecycle.

Executive Dashboard and Reports

Allow all stakeholders to view results at both a granular and enterprise level across one or many deployments by utilizing:

  • Executive dashboards
  • Score card reports
  • Configurable risk analysis indicators
  • Trend results
  • Historical view into your compliance history

Enhance content compliance with stored metadata including: age and author of the document, access times, dates, frequency, item level security, and system security.

Assessments Answer the key "who, what, when, where, and how" questions for content inside your organization to identify key areas of risk.
Automatic Classification Scan all platforms against a common corporate taxonomy to ensure data is accurately classified, categorized, and stored in your environment.
Policy Enforcement Take steps to remedy breaches going forward based on your classified content and regulatory policies.
Benchmarks for Growth Set common goals and monitor risk levels going forward to show that progress is being made against policies and regulation.

Accessibility Compliance

AvePoint Compliance Solutions empower content managers and executives to create, implement, remediate, and monitor compliance with accessibility requirements. These solutions enable organizations to quickly troubleshoot sources of Web site quality issues and identify non-compliance with corporate standards, industry regulations, as well as legislation concerning accessibility and other compliance issues. Approaching accessibility as an afterthought is a resource intensive and costly strategy –organizations that include accessibility management as part of their development plans, quality assurance, and testing practices will have a tremendous economic advantage.

Accessibility

Learn more about AvePoint Compliance Solutions for Accessibility

Accessibility Solution for Microsoft ® SharePoint ®

AvePoint Accessibility Solution for SharePoint, combining AvePoint Accessibility Accelerator with AvePoint Compliance Guardian, supports a robust risk management lifecycle to ensure SharePoint framework and web pages remain accessible. The AvePoint Accessibility Accelerator (AAA) is an optional add-on for AvePoint Compliance Guardian that provides accessibility and usability enhancements for Microsoft SharePoint environments. AAA provides an innovative approach empowering organizations to achieve their SharePoint accessibility goals by using accessible IT solutions to create inclusive, accessible websites and employee Intranet portals. AAA is developed as a set of building blocks rather than an end-to-end solution. Deployed in combination with Compliance Guardian, customers can utilize various pieces of AAA to integrate particular components into their SharePoint deployment processes – meeting their specific organizational or regulatory requirements. Compliance Guardian is used to scan and validate accessibility gaps in the SharePoint framework, and AAA is deployed to correct those gaps. Used iteratively, the solutions allow organizations to build and deploy a fully accessible SharePoint environment. Compliance Guardian is then used to maintain accessibility and compliance not only of the sites, but also of the content managed through them.

AAA is intended to significantly reduce the time, knowledge, and effort required to implement a SharePoint-based website that conforms to the aforementioned accessibility regulations, including Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments and World Wide Web Consortium’s WCAG 2.0 Guidelines. Deployed in combination with Compliance Guardian, AAA helps organizations building an accessible and reusable SharePoint environment to meet their specific organizational or regulatory requirements.

Accessibility for SharePoint

Learn more about AvePoint Accessibility Solution for Microsoft ® SharePoint ®

Operational Security/Sensitive Security Information Compliance

AvePoint Compliance Solutions has the capability of preventing the likelihood of security information leaks in several ways. First, by providing the ability to scan content in real time or on a schedule based on out-of-the-box test definitions files mapping to a wide range of US, international, and vertical specific requirements and legislation for OPSEC, SSI and ITAR requirements. Additionally, AvePoint Compliance Solutions enables organizations to tag sensitive data with either an embedded metatag within the document and/or with SharePoint metadata (if the content is managed within SharePoint) and to indicate the sensitivity level of that content. AvePoint Compliance Solutions provide unlimited extensibility for advanced metadata classification and schemas, including the ability to block, delete, quarantine and move data to a protected location as well as protecting information in place through assignment of specific limited permissions based on the document classification. AvePoint’s end-to-end solutions provide a fully integrated risk management lifecycle approach that enables enterprises to mitigate the likelihood of an OPSEC/SSI content breach.

OPSEC/SSI

Learn more about AvePoint Compliance Solutions for Operational Security and Sensitive Security Information

Privacy Compliance

AvePoint AvePoint Compliance Solutions allow Chief Privacy Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Compliance Managers, Records Managers, SharePoint administrators, and company executives to implement automated access and content controls for their enterprise-wide IT systems and file share systems. This way, they can have a clear understanding of how their systems are being used and instill controls to maximize efficiency and access while also helping to prevent breaches from happening. However, if and when a breach does occur, AvePoint Compliance Solutions enable the appropriate personnel to swiftly detect those breaches, track, respond, and recover – mitigating the likelihood of a catastrophic incident.

Privacy

Learn more about AvePoint Compliance Solutions for Privacy

Site Quality Compliance

AvePoint Compliance Solutions track and monitor Web systems’ structural integrity to help ensure that they are providing an optimum quality experience from both a content and site perspective. AvePoint Compliance Solutions provide important data that help reduce organization’s required costs and resources to ensure Internet/intranet based systems are structurally sound, available, as well as proactively troubleshoot sources of performance problems before end users experience them with automated e-mail alerts. AvePoint Compliance Solutions provide an easy-to-use, cost effective mechanism for automated, scheduled, and on-demand monitoring of multiple systems. The result is dramatically reduced time, cost, and complexity associated with building, deploying, and maintaining a properly functioning Web site or server.

Site Quality

Learn more about AvePoint Compliance Solutions for Site Quality

Next Steps

The decisions you make regarding how your content is protected have long-term consequences.

AvePoint Compliance Solutions can assist with every step of this process, from discovery and policy creation to technical enforcement. We will ensure you implement a strong compliance program that keeps access in the hands of those who should have it, and out of the hands of those who should not.

  1. Discover more: Read our " Meeting Compliance Objectives in Microsoft SharePoint " white paper and Compliance Solutions Brief to discover how you can help balance collaboration with compliance.
  2. Assess your risk level: Schedule an assessment with us and get a personalized heat-map for risk in your organization. Learn more about AvePoint Compliance Solutions for Accessibility Compliance , OPSEC/SSI Compliance , Privacy Compliance , and Site Quality Compliance .
  3. Assess a select portion of your SharePoint environment, detecting any areas of concern or risk, and report on compliance infractions and at-risk sites with AvePoint’s Compliance Healthcheck . Develop a best practices approach to subsequently reduce the risk of compliance infractions to support a comprehensive risk management lifecycle.
  4. Utilize AvePoint’s Cloud Readiness Assessment to determine what content is cloud appropriate. This assessment helps organizations identify sensitive or regulated content and develop a best practices approach to separate regulated and non-regulated content or workloads, and subsequently migrate appropriate content to the cloud.
  5. Establish an action plan: Contact us to put together a preventative and automated solution and save on resources.
AvePoint Compliance Solutions