12/18/2025
Table of ContentsAustralia's financial services industry is at an inflection point. Growth is accelerating, but so is the weight of regulatory oversight. Prudential standards like CPS 220 and guidance such as CPG 235, as mandated by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), are no longer just compliance checklists — they're shaping how organisations design governance frameworks in an era of relentless digital transformation.
As financial organisations embrace cloud collaboration, including platforms like Microsoft 365 to drive innovation, a critical question emerges: How do you safeguard compliance when sensitive data is everywhere and access is fluid?
The answer begins with visibility. Without a clear line of sight into where high-risk information resides and who can touch it, organisations risk compliance gaps, audit delays, and exposure to insider and external threats.
This blog explores how leading financial organisations turn visibility into strategic advantage: leveraging dashboards, risk heatmaps, and automated reporting to close compliance gaps, accelerate audit readiness, and enable proactive remediation.
The Visibility Gap in Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 has redefined collaboration for financial organisations, enabling real-time communication across Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Yet this agility introduces governance blind spots where sensitive information proliferates without oversight.
These blind spots represent strategic risk. In an environment where regulatory expectations are intensifying and data breaches can erode trust overnight, visibility and control have become non-negotiable.
Research from AvePoint’s 2025 report, The State of AI: Go Beyond the Hype to Navigate Trust, Security and Value, indicates that data sprawl is accelerating as organisations adopt cloud collaboration tools at scale:
- Almost 80% of organisations manage 1 PB or more of data, with close to 20% anticipating generative AI (GenAI) to create more than half their information within a year.
- As reliance on GenAI assistance increases, so will data growth, which is expected to almost double from 22.5% to 40% over just a two-year window.
- 75.1% of organisations have experienced at least one data security incident involving overshared sensitive data.
This uncontrolled growth makes it difficult to track where sensitive data is stored and who has access, particularly in environments with thousands of users and shared workspaces. APRA’s Prudential Standard CPS 220 sets enforceable requirements for risk management frameworks, while Prudential Practice Guide CPG 235 offers guidance on managing data risk and strengthening governance practices. These regulatory mandates underscore a strategic imperative: achieving visibility into high-risk data is no longer optional — it's foundational to compliance and resilience.
Yet many organisations remain constrained by legacy, manual processes that cannot keep pace with the velocity and complexity of cloud collaboration. This creates governance gaps that expose processes to regulatory risk and erode trust in an increasingly digital-first economy.
The consequences of poor visibility are severe. Accidental exposure of sensitive data, insider threats, and audit failures can lead to financial penalties and reputational damage. According to IBM’s 2025 research, the global average cost of a data breach is now at $4.4 million. Establishing visibility is the cornerstone of a modern risk management strategy and the foundation for audit readiness. Without it, organisations can’t move from reactive governance to proactive control, leaving resilience and regulatory confidence out of reach.
Dashboards and Risk Heatmaps: From Oversight to Strategic Insight
Visibility is only the beginning. To meet regulatory expectations and build resilience, organisations need intelligence-driven oversight that transforms raw data into prioritised actions — leveraging dashboards, risk heatmaps, and dynamic scoring that aligns with CPS 220's mandate for continuous risk assessment and CPG 235's guidance on risk-based decision-making.
Dashboards: From Data to Decisions
If a regulator were to review your environment today, could you present a clear, consolidated view of your risk posture? Dashboards provide that assurance as governance in action, surfacing material risks across thousands of Microsoft 365 workspaces to answer critical regulatory questions: Where do your highest exposures lie? Can you act swiftly to mitigate them? This capability aligns with CPS 220's mandate for timely reporting and governance frameworks while reducing complexity and accelerating audit readiness. It demonstrates compliance as systematic, proactive, and resilient.
Risk Heatmaps: Prioritising What Matters Most
If a regulator asked how you ensure resources are focused on the highest-risk exposures, risk heatmaps provide the answer. They enable prioritisation by highlighting misclassified information and risky permissions, allowing compliance teams to focus on critical vulnerabilities, like sensitive data shared externally or permissions granted to inactive accounts, demonstrating alignment with CPG 235's risk-based decision-making principles and signaling to regulators that governance is targeted and strategic.
Dynamic Risk Scoring: Qualifying Governance
What evidence can you provide that risk management is measurable and adaptive? Dynamic risk scoring delivers that proof. By assigning quantifiable values to risks based on multiple factors, organisations can track trends, measure remediation effectiveness, and demonstrate continuous monitoring, reinforcing CPS 220's mandate for ongoing risk assessment and CPG 235's expectations. For regulators, it answers a critical question: Can you show that your governance framework is adaptable to changing risks?
The AvePoint Confidence Platform operationalises these principles by integrating dashboards, heatmaps, and scoring directly into Microsoft 365. It automates risk identification, prioritisation, and reporting — reducing manual intervention and enabling governance at scale. For financial organisations, compliance readiness is not an aspiration; it's a built-in capability.
Automating Oversight: Reporting and Remediation for Audit Readiness
CPS 220 and CPG 235 demand continuous governance and demonstrable risk management. In an era of rapid digital transformation, manual reporting and remediation are no longer viable; they are slow, resource-heavy, and prone to error. Automation has become a strategic imperative, delivering accuracy, consistency, and speed at scale, thereby turning compliance into a proactive capability that ensures audit readiness and strengthens resilience.
Automated Reporting for Compliance Evidence
If a regulator asked for proof of compliance today, could you provide accurate, real-time evidence without delay? Could you demonstrate that governance is continuous, not reactive? Automated reporting makes this possible, eliminating manual inefficiencies and delivering timely, verifiable documentation on demand, transforming reporting from a burden into strategic advantage.
Continuous Monitoring and Proactive Alerts
If a regulator asked how you prevent compliance gaps before they occur, could you demonstrate that oversight is continuous? Automated monitoring provides that assurance by tracking sensitive data and permissions in real time. Proactive alerts flag overshared information or misconfigured permissions for immediate remediation, proving your organisation identifies material risks and acts before they escalate.
Growth Demands Governance
Growth in financial services is a catalyst for innovation, but it also amplifies regulatory scrutiny and operational risk. As financial organisations scale their digital footprint and embrace platforms like Microsoft 365, the complexity of managing sensitive data grows exponentially. Compliance with CPS 220 and alignment with CPG 235 is not a checkbox exercise but a strategic imperative for sustaining trust and resilience in a competitive market.
All financial organisations must ask: Can we demonstrate governance that is continuous, proactive, and audit-ready at any moment? Visibility into high-risk data is the cornerstone of this capability. Dashboards, risk heatmaps, and dynamic scoring transform fragmented information into actionable intelligence, enabling prioritisation and oversight. Automation elevates this further — delivering continuous monitoring, accurate reporting, and rapid remediation.
The AvePoint Confidence Platform operationalises these principles, integrating visibility, prioritisation, and automation into a unified solution. By closing the visibility gap, financial organisations can confidently pursue growth while meeting regulations and safeguarding their most critical asset: data. In an era where growth and compliance are inseparable, proactive governance is the foundation for sustainable success.
