How Prudential Keeps Office 365 Sprawl Under Control (Case Study)

The AvePoint Solution

Cloud Governance can automate almost any policy or procedure in an Office 365 environment–like Microsoft Teams–by guiding the Group creation process through a self-serving form-based website.

“Every new team or SharePoint site is managed by Cloud Governance. When someone needs help from my team, we now have a ticketing system. Now they simply fill out a form and the provisioning system will control the creation and approval for us,” said Young.

Cloud Governance has the functionality to automatically enforce critical governance components of a team or site such as naming conventions, lifecycle, permissions, ownership, and much more.

Prudential has started with a simple implementation of Cloud Governance to realize immediate value, but is planning to leverage the tool further to enforce more granular governance policies.

“We haven’t gotten too complex, but definitely plan on it. Right now, all our sites have been deemed internal with no PII (personally identifiable information) or sensitive information… We are planning on looking into different policies based on the level of sensitivity,” said Young. “Currently, we have a single team provisioning process. Everyone can request the same team with a 50-gigabyte limit. However, we have set it up on the back end to automatically be approved for directors and above.”

Additionally, Prudential is planning on leveraging Cloud Governance to securely enable external collaboration.

“We will also be opening external sites to collaborate with vendors on work, which will need heavy management. We currently block all users from adding any external users to anything. They have to come through IT and management directly,” said Young.

Prudential has also decided to force and create a sense of ownership for sites and teams through automating a renewal policy.

Young explains, “We set up Cloud Governance policies to put a renewal profile against sites and teams. We are getting more requests asking which sites belong to which users. This policy and easy reporting have helped us understand and create ownership.”

Prudential’s North American tenant has been so successful with Cloud Governance, the company plans to integrate it globally.

“Our Japanese tenant is a completely different entity. They are rolling everything out in Office 365, but will also be using Cloud Governance by following our North American strategy,” said Young.