Advanced Data Solutions : Mitigate the Impact of Communication Risks by Accelerating Review Time

As employees start coming back to the office, the work environment will be different than the one we left in 2020. Hybrid work will be the norm, with many organizations giving employees the flexibility to choose when and where to work. Digital communications will continue to proliferate as teams collaborate across various locations.

In this hybrid work world, organizations continue to look for ways to empower employees to do their best work, while keeping their critical assets safe. Organizations will need to continue managing communication risks that occur digitally to meet regulatory compliance obligations and to flag concerning behavior such as sharing adult content or threatening language. Communication Compliance helps organizations quickly identify and act on regulatory compliance and code of conduct violations, with as little disruption as possible to business operations.

Back in May, we released several new features that further enrich Communication Compliance’s integration with Microsoft Teams, intelligence, visibility, and reporting capabilities. Today, we are excited to announce new capabilities in public preview that will further improve the review experience, making it easier to investigate and remediate communication risks. For all the new features highlighted below, we have built strong safeguards and controls into the solution by default, such as pseudonymization, rules-based access control, admin explicit opt-in of users, and auditing. All designed to make sure user privacy is always at the center of the solution.

Improved review experience

Machine learning not only identifies communication risks based on various signals but also picks up on context that keywords or lexicons may have otherwise missed. We have invested in several pre-configured machine learning templates that detect risks, such as regulatory compliance, sensitive information types, offensive language, and conflicts of interest. When parsing through flagged violations, it’s important to reduce the noise and provide context to help investigators quickly assess whether a communication presents a potential violation.

We are excited to announce our new global feedback loop, which allows investigators to submit feedback on misclassified policy matches, effectively retraining and improving the detection algorithm. Combining machine learning with this global feedback loop makes our global classifiers more accurate and helps to reduce false positives over time. This new capability, coupled with our recent announcement around additional Teams message context, will help speed up the investigation process of reviewing compliance violations. With Teams message context, investigators no longer need to spend hours running a content search, and instead can see the message context instantly while reviewing the violation. All feedback submitted through the global feedback loop will be maintained per enterprise privacy data laws.

View of Teams message context and global feedback loop in Investigator role.

Additionally, hybrid work has driven the need to detect communication risks across various Microsoft Teams content. We are excited to announce that customers will now have the ability to analyze the content of modern attachments, such as content linked to on OneDrive and SharePoint, that are shared in Teams messages.

Finally, we are rolling out features to enhance the review experience, including the ability to bulk remediate up to 500 messages, to search within filters and to customize columns for pending or resolved items.

Efficient policy configuration

We know that customers often have similar needs across business lines or departments. At the same time, we know that many stakeholders are involved in the review process, depending on the type of policy violation. For example, insider trading is often resolved by the compliance team whereas cases of harassment are resolved by the HR team. Therefore, we’ve made it possible to easily duplicate existing compliance policies and apply them to other groups of users or reviewers, reducing the time it takes and providing more flexibility to configure a new policy.

View of clone policy on policy page.

Get Started

These new features in Communication Compliance have already rolled out or will start rolling out to customers’ tenants in the coming weeks. Communication Compliance is part of a broader set of Insider Risk Management solutions that help organizations mitigate insider risks and policy violations in Microsoft 365 E5. The solution is also generally available across government clouds, supported in GCC, GCC-High, and DoD tenants.

You can sign up for a trial of Microsoft 365 E5 or navigate to the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center to get started today. Learn more about what’s new with Communication Compliance and how to get started and configure policies in your tenant in this supporting documentation. We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Read our most recent TD Securities customer story

IT specialists at TD Securities were focused on providing a highly secure and compliant infrastructure built around Microsoft 365 Communication Compliance. That would enable and underpin subsequent adoption of the latest technologies for enhanced communication and collaboration across all business units. Key to that adoption effort has been migration from an earlier environment with Skype, SharePoint, and third-party applications to a consolidated infrastructure featuring Microsoft Teams, a process accelerated by the recent pandemic. Learn more here.

Tune in to our podcast: Uncovering Hidden Risks

We have partnered with some of the top experts and thought leaders in the insider risk space who have a deep understanding of the challenges organizations face, and the people, processes, and technology being used to address insider risks. Tune in to our podcast series Uncovering Hidden Risks, where we dive deep on topics like signal indicators, machine learning, and sentiment analysis.