Nearly One-Third of Organisations Using Microsoft Office 365 Indicate “Poor” Governance Readiness

 Email This Post

LONDON, UK – April 02, 2019 — /BackupReview.info/ — Nearly one-third (30%) of Microsoft Office 365 users indicate that the overall state of governance readiness within their organisations is “poor”. That’s according to a survey conducted by Spanning Cloud Apps LLC and CollabTalk on security and compliance perceptions and realities for Microsoft Office 365 users.

When asked to name their biggest security challenges, the leading causes for concern from survey respondents were shadow IT, referenced by 16% of the sample, and lack of security training for all employees (also 16%). These were closely followed by ‘lack of security policies and controls’ (14%) and ‘no monitoring solution specifically looking for data and security breaches’ (13%).

In terms of compliance challenges, the most widely-cited by the sample was ‘end-users don’t classify data correctly and/or take required actions’ (referenced by 38%). This was followed by ‘content stored in legacy content systems’ which was highlighted by 35% and ‘content spread across multiple workloads’ (34%). More than one in ten (11%) ranked Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies and procedures among their biggest challenges in this area.

Survey respondents were also asked whether they believed the current security and compliance features in Microsoft Office 365 were sufficient for their organisational requirements. 14% believe that the current security protection is not sufficient while more than a fifth (22%) believe Office 365’s compliance capabilities are not sufficient.

In general, the research team believes these concerns can be attributed to the education gap around Office 365 security and compliance capabilities rather than issues with the software itself.

“The gap presented in this research is not from a lack of features, vision or direction from Microsoft; the gap comes from within organisations,” said Matthew McDermott, Spanning’s principal technical marketing engineer and a 13-time Microsoft Office Apps and Services MVP. “Companies must invest in personnel and tools to ensure compliance and secure systems. It’s not enough, with today’s threat landscape, to be reactive. You need to be proactive in your approach to keeping your assets and customer data safe and secure.”

This global research was sponsored in part by Spanning and conducted in partnership with the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University and CollabTalk. More than 270 IT professionals across 19 industries were surveyed, with all running environments that range from legacy hardware to cloud and hybrid.

To view the full survey report and learn more about the findings, visit https://spanning.com/resources/reports/organizational-security-compliance-practices-office-365/

About Spanning
Spanning Cloud Apps, a Kaseya company, is the leading provider of backup and recovery for SaaS applications, helping organisations around the globe protect their information in the cloud. The company provides powerful, enterprise-class data protection for Microsoft Office 365, G Suite, and Salesforce. With data centers located in North America, the EU, and Australia, Spanning Backup is the most trusted cloud-to-cloud backup solution for thousands of companies and millions of users around the world. Learn more at www.spanning.com. Follow Spanning on Twitter @spanningbackup.

Contact:
Alex Sweeney
Account Manager
T: +44 (0) 1252 727313 ext 208
M: 07918552082
E: alexs@whiteoaks.co.uk

Source: Spanning

Tags: Microsoft, Office 365, Spanning