Maintaining Business Continuity During A Global Health Crisis

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, a seismic shift has altered the business landscape and pushed many companies to support digital and remote work environments.

But some organisations hastily moved to adopt Microsoft 365 and digital collaboration technologies during this unprecedented time without addressing core issues of governance, compliance and user experience.

These concerns, combined with a growing interest for hybrid workspaces, presents leaders with several important questions: How are they preparing for the future, and how they are building upon the digital progress made in the last year?

See how COVID-19 has impacted workplace collaboration with new insightful statistics such as:

  • IT teams express confidence in their collaboration security: Nearly all (95%) of companies believe they are compliant with internal and external regulations. Similarly, only 7% lacked confidence that their digital collaboration deployment was secure from data leaks and unauthorised access.
  • However, only about a quarter are currently doing routine governance, compliance, and security tasks: Annually, just 28% check the settings and membership of Microsoft Teams, to identify potential risks. Only 25% remove guest users, in addition to less than a quarter (22%) who can determine who has access to specific data for audits, and the mere 13% who can restore individual files deleted for a year or longer.

This report, conducted in partnership with Exec Survey and iGov Survey, reveals how over 200 unique organisations in the U.K. enabled seamless business continuity amid rapid societal change, where they face security challenges today, and what policies and procedures they are prioritising in the next six months.

Featuring case studies of real-world digital collaboration during COVID-19:

  • City of Port St. Lucie Fixes Thousands of Over-Permissioned Sharing Links, Improves Guest Access Oversight with Policies and Insights
  • Metropolitan Council Responds to COVID-19 Work-from-Home Orders by Deploying Cloud Governance and Microsoft Teams
  • Swinburne Uses Cloud Governance to Rapidly Extend Microsoft Teams to Students During COVID-19

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Extent And Speed Of Digital Transformation

The Side Effects Of Compressed Digital Transformations

Investment For The Future

Collaboration During COVID-19 Case Studies

Appendix: Participating Organisations

Interesting Takeaways

In April 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Our survey validates that statement and the skyrocketing daily active user numbers for Microsoft Teams, which has overtaken Slack and never looked back. (pg.8)

Unlike other security aspects like network security, collaboration security is not a matter of putting up one large firewall. The way we collaborate evolves and shifts over time and based on the purpose of that collaboration—your collaboration security should be automated to evolve accordingly. (pg.16)

Learn how COVID-19 changed the impact of workplace collaboration!

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