Mobile Device Management in Office 365

Office 365’s mobile device management tools help you manage access to your Office 365 environment through a diverse range of phones and tablets, regardless of operating system.

These features will help you to better manage security policies across the devices that connect to your Office 365 environment, ensuring your security, compliance, and governance policies and procedures extend to every access point for your environment.

While governance is important, the governance of your Office 365 environment has less to do with the technology and more to do with the practices and procedures you put in place to administrate your information assets. Office 365 provides the tools and capabilities you require to develop sound governance standards, and meet your internal and industry-defined governance requirements. A cohesive, holistic and practical approach to governance is required for platforms like Office 365, where the reach is extensive. With the simplification of development practices in the move to a cloud environment, you now are able to more easily shift resources to concentrate on process and governance where doing so was difficult in the past.

Thanks to this shift, there have been some successful overhauls in how we view governance practices and where it is important to focus our time.

When approaching governance of your Office 365 environment, is it important to holistically review your strategy and tactical plans to execute that strategy. Consider each of these four areas:

• Foundation: Set the ground rules for how your platform operates and what information technology security parameters it must operate in to remain compliant. Address the structure and support your organization will provide to keep your environment in working order.
• Administration: Placing an emphasis on teamwork between your administrative teams will streamline issue resolution and promote the nature of the platform’s collaboration core. As with any team environment, definition of roles and responsibilities will be key to success. Also be sure to set a clear vision for the future in order for your administrators to manage your environment with the future in mind.
• Communication: One of the clearest forms of collaboration is through communication. Be very straightforward and open when it comes to governance of your new platform. Gone are the days of running everything from a dark closet behind the curtain. Bring your voice and vision to the forefront and afford your employees the ability to have a voice — truly productive collaboration is sure to follow!
• Adoption: Focus some resources on user engagement, awareness and recognition in order to ensure adoption of new features. Placing some power and authority into the hands of your users will encourage them to explore and become personally invested in the technology and how it can benefit their day to day work. There are many great online resources available with guidance on how to approach governance in Microsoft’s cloud first/mobile first world. While Office 365 provides many of the tools and features you need to maintain your governance standards, many organizations elect to invest in third-party solutions to help them better manage their governance activities. Start your planning by understanding your governance goals and priorities, and look to the Office 365 community for advice on where to begin.

It’s wise to understand what Microsoft does behind the scenes to manage and protect your data so if there is an issue, you know how to react to it quickly and efficiently.