If you"re not familiar with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it"s a fairly new piece of legislation in the European Union that gives users more control over their data. In a world where online experiences are tailored based on user data, the GDPR is what Microsoft calls a "logical policy component of our technology landscape."
But this also creates new issues for companies and IT administrators. According to Microsoft, just 50% of EU organizations have documented their sensitive data, 77% plan to spend over a million dollars on compliance, and 92% consider compliance a top data protection priority.
With that in mind, Microsoft is announcing Compliance Manager, a cloud service that helps companies to understand their compliance risk, as well as improve upon it. It works across various Microsoft Cloud services.
As you can see from the image above, it"s not just for GDPR compliance either. The tool is meant to cover a broad range of regulations, and Microsoft says that it has "the largest certified compliance portfolio, services architected to be secure by design, and the most extensive global datacenter footprint in the industry."
The firm says that among cloud vendors, it was identified as the most trusted at 28%, followed by IBM at 16%. And 92% of IT managers that use the cloud said they were confident in their GDPR readiness, whereas just 65% of those that store data on-premises said the same.
Microsoft Compliance Manager is coming to Microsoft 365 and commercial Office 365 subscribers, and you can check out the preview today.