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Manage Microsoft Teams & Establish Security: Six Questions You Should Be Asking - Interlink Cloud Blog

Written by Interlink Cloud Advisors | Feb 25, 2021 5:00:00 AM

Managing Microsoft Teams enables your organization to optimize productive collaboration but requires thoughtful planning to do it well. Read on to consider what’s best for your organization!
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Overview of Teams

Microsoft Teams is a powerful platform that combines workplace chat, meetings, notes, and attachments. Teams integrates with your Office 365 subscription productivity suite and feature extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products as well. It provides a place for your team to collaborate on projects through unified communication, which increases business effectiveness.

Six Questions Your Organization Should Be Asking

Interlink has put together these six questions we believe all organizations should be asking themselves to ensure they are managing Teams well and have established appropriate security through governance and compliance.

  1. What data retention policies for Teams is best for your environment and industry?
  2. Who is allowed to create a Team? Should they all have those permissions?
  3. Should you archive or expire unused Teams?
  4. Do you know which of your Teams are public or private?
  5. Are you licensed correctly to fully utilize Data Loss Protection in Teams?
  6. Do you need to protect Teams from containing protected words or profanity in their names?

With Microsoft Teams comes rules, management, security, and policies for your organization to consider. If you are unsure how to answer any of the questions above, you may have a compliance, governance, or security risk. Save time and money by establishing best practices and saving your organization headaches down the road by getting on track today. Interlink can help you learn more about security within Teams and how to manage Teams effectively!

Microsoft Teams Management

While Teams creation brings collaboration to an organization, too many teams can hinder it and slow down business. Deciding and controlling who in your organization can create teams allows for intentional channels to be built for collaboration. Additionally, your organization should manage whether collaborative guests can be added to certain teams.

Having set naming conventions allows your teams to be found quickly and mitigates duplicate creation. Different industries require different data retention and management policies. Policies like archiving teams may even vary within an organization – for example, the Finance channel in a banking organization will have different policies and retention than the Marketing channel. Understanding what kind of data will be shared in different teams enables organizations to meet legal standards when setting up expiration, retention, and archiving policies.

Microsoft Teams Security

Teams provides both auditing and reporting tools which vary by license. For example, audit log search plugs right into the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center and gives organizations the ability to set alerts, as well as report and audit events. You can filter and export data for further investigation and analysis. Additionally, not all Teams licenses include some features of compliance like Data Loss Prevention – which protect sensitive information in both messages and documents. If you are unsure what you own, Interlink offers a free Licensing Health Check which utilizes a proven methodology so you can optimize and license appropriately.

Your organization should also consider how secure your Teams environment is. Because Teams works in partnership with SharePoint, OneNote, Exchange, and more, you should be comfortable managing security in Microsoft 365 or Office 365 all-up. Compliance, data management, privacy, back-ups, guest access, and safe attachments are all important areas for strategy development.

How Interlink Can Help

It can be complicated to navigate all the decisions that come with managing Microsoft Teams. Take advantage of our expertise and experience – we know how to save your organization time and money when it comes to managing Teams. Interlink’s experts can help your organization develop a clear vision of needs and which tools or methods are the best fit. Interlink is here for you – from consultation to our Teams Workshop & Implementation Offer which will help you develop a clear vision of your specific organizational needs and how Teams will benefit your users. We deliver on four core ideals to create a digital workspace for high-performing teams. Contact us today to learn more, or to take advantage of this offer and see if your organization qualifies for Microsoft funding!