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5 Essential Steps to Support Safe Collaboration for Hybrid Work 

Today’s changes around work environments, an increase in cloud threats, and technological advancements pose challenges over control, visibility, and security in cloud workspaces. More employees are demanding flexibility in where, when, and how they work: How do you ensure your security isn’t compromised? 

As new trends in hybrid work emerge, there is a greater need to strategize your approach to securing your users’ collaboration habits. Here are five essential steps to take so you can support safe collaboration for hybrid work: 

In a previous webinar, AvePoint Solutions Engineer Dennis Hoogenraad shared how organizations can support safe collaboration in the new world of work. Check out his insights in our on-demand replay. 

1. Consolidate Cloud Services 

As people increasingly use cloud services to meet, collaborate, share files, and so on, organizations are experiencing an explosion of Software-as-a-Service apps their employees use regularly. Today, companies use an average of 137 SaaS apps in their environment. 

consolidate-cloud-apps

While this growth pushed an increase in productivity, it also introduced the need for better security. Having a multitude of unchecked apps leaves organizational data in chaos and vulnerable to cyberattacks. In addition, IT teams are challenged to keep up with the maintenance and adoption needs of all these SaaS apps. 

To reduce the complexity of how your users work, cut collaboration costs, and have better visibility over your data, consolidate your cloud services by eliminating redundant solutions and streamlining how you manage these apps.  

Learn how you can consolidate all your organization’s SaaS needs in Microsoft 365 in our eBook: Consolidating Cloud Services and Fully Leveraging Microsoft 365 

2. Drive sustainable adoption 

Once you’ve identified your most essential SaaS apps for your hybrid work setup, ensure they are adopted in a sustainable way.   

As your solutions need to support different collaboration types, it’s equally critical to smooth out any friction in using them in order to strike the balance between productivity and security. 

microsoft teams for hybrid setup

AvePoint MyHub, for example, helps connect IT teams with users by encouraging the easy provisioning and management of settings in Microsoft Teams. This way, users, managers, or department leaders can do their jobs without having to memorize policy settings because everything is already enforced.  

This also alleviates the burden on IT teams because they can dictate policy-driven services for provisioning, classifying and managing the lifecycle of workspaces—and can build in approval processes and controls as needed.   

Explore the benefits of giving users the power to maximize Microsoft 365 features while easily keeping risks in check in our eBook: The Value of Automated Office 365 & Teams Governance 

3. Protect and back up your data 

Keep in mind when deploying your SaaS platforms that there’s a limit to how SaaS providers can protect your data. SaaS providers are focused on the availability of their platforms. To be safe from data loss scenarios and cloud threats, you need a plan and approach to back up your data.  

AvePoint Cloud Backup, named a leader in SaaS Application Data Protection by Forrester Research, offers comprehensive and automated data backup across Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Salesforce, and Google Workspace, allowing users to easily restore content during accidental or malicious data loss scenarios. 

Office 365 Backup 3

More than backing up your data, it benefits IT admins and users alike with personal content restore features, as well as proactive ransomware detection capabilities to help ensure business continuity. 

Discover why and how the Backup-as-a-Service landscape is changing by downloading the Gartner Market Guide for Backup as a Service.  

4. Manage entitlements 

To maximize your investment with both collaboration and security capabilities in Microsoft 365, start keeping track of your entitlements. In today’s challenging macroeconomic environment, there’s a need to optimize costs and eliminate those that no longer serve your organization’s purpose.   

In Microsoft 365, tracking users and licenses means leveraging admin tools in the Admin Center, Azure, and Dynamics. These multiple processes, coupled with the limited reports available—could become cumbersome, especially for large organizations.  

AvePoint Cense optimizes your Microsoft 365 license management by enabling both central and unit reporting capabilities as well as offering delegated control so you can easily manage your users’ licenses. From there, you can turn data into useful insights to ultimately empower secure collaboration.  

5. Ensure collaboration security 

Now that it’s easy for everyone to share everything in the cloud, what visibility do you have over your organization’s data?  

Do you know which content is being accessed by whom? What data is exposed to external users? How is your content being shared and to whom? Is your sensitive information being overshared? 

avepoint policies and insights

With AvePoint Policies and Insights (PI), gain insights on all your shared content—who has access to what, how it’s being used, what sensitivity labels it has, and how it is being shared. Then, quickly remediate and correct oversharing with automation, whether that’s revoking access or deleting sharing links, fixing sensitivity labels, enforcing control, and monitoring your overall Microsoft 365 security—all in one platform. 

Learn how one of our customers delivered real-time Microsoft 365 risk assessment and remediation with AvePoint Policies & Insights in our recent case study.  

Learn more 

Bring all these five essential steps for supporting safe collaboration for hybrid work together by watching our on-demand webinar today.  


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Sherian Batallones
Sherian Batallones
Sherian Batallones is a Content Marketing Specialist at AvePoint, covering AvePoint and Microsoft solutions, including SaaS management, governance, backup, and data management. She believes organizations can scale their cloud management, collaboration, and security by finding the right digital transformation technology and partner.

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