Compliance joins Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA)

Like many of you, I’m thrilled to have my 2020 calendar safely in the recycling pile. During that time though, you too might have noticed how, perhaps unknowingly, you were able to turn some of last year’s lemons into lemonade. Maybe you developed a deeper appreciation for everyday moments and the people in your life, gaining a new perspective on what matters most.

For my team, seeing the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) grow to 190 partner companies has been a bright spot in a dark year. To date, MISA members have created 215 product integrations, and I’m pleased to announce that our pilot program for adding managed security service providers (MSSPs) has formally transitioned. MISA now includes 39 MSSP members who have created 76 MSSP offers since the beginning of the fiscal year.

“Microsoft Security integrates with a broad ecosystem of platforms and cloud providers, so they work with the things you already have in your environment; whether those things are from Microsoft, or not. Our partners are key to helping facilitate this integration.”—Vasu Jakkal, CVP, Security, Compliance and Identity

“Adding managed security service providers promises to increase the ecosystem’s value even more by offering an extra layer of threat protection—reducing the day-to-day involvement of in-house security teams. It’s another important step in strengthening and simplifying security at a time when risk mitigation is one of IT’s highest priorities.”—Shawn O’Grady, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud + Data Center Transformation at Insight

Because Microsoft’s footprint extends across many technologies, we have an advantage in creating holistic solutions that encompass the full breadth of security, compliance, and identity. In keeping with that end-to-end approach, we’ve expanded MISA to include 5 new compliance products, growing the MISA product portfolio to 18.

“The explosion of data from digital transformation and remote work make the integration of security and compliance tools across internal and external ecosystems more critical than ever. Together with the deep expertise of our MISA members, we can help our customers address their complex, evolving security and compliance needs.”—Alym Rayani, General Manager, Microsoft Compliance

Compliance comes to MISA

Microsoft compliance products help our customers assess their compliance risk, protect their sensitive data, and govern it according to regulatory requirements. Through MISA, members get support in building managed services and integrations that:

1. Protect and govern data wherever it lives.
2. Identify and take actions on critical insider risks.
3. Simplify compliance and reducing risk.
4. Investigate and respond with relevant data.

“TeleMessage is excited to bring our Mobile Communication Archiving products to be a part of Microsoft’s security solutions. Being a MISA member allows us to work closely with the Microsoft teams and allows us to provide seamless, secure, and compliant integrations delivering all popular forms of mobile communication.”—Guy Levit, CEO at TeleMessage

Microsoft Information Protection has been part of MISA since the association began in 2018, providing broad coverage across devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises systems. This year, we’re continuing to develop our holistic partner community across security, compliance, and identity by adding five additional Microsoft compliance products to our portfolio:

• Microsoft Information Governance: Keep what you need and delete what you don’t. Apply compliance solutions and a deletion workflow for email, documents, instant messages, social media, document collaboration platforms, and more.
• Microsoft Data Loss Prevention: Help users stay compliant without interrupting their workflow—prevent the accidental sharing of sensitive information across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams, and desktop versions of Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Word.
• Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management: Identify critical insider risks and take the appropriate action. With built-in privacy controls, use native and third-party signals to identify, investigate, and remediate malicious and inadvertent activities in your organization.
• Microsoft Advanced eDiscovery: Gain an end-to-end workflow to collect, analyze, preserve, and export content that’s responsive to your organization’s internal and external investigations. Identify persons of interest and their data sources, then manage the legal-hold communication process.
• Microsoft Compliance Manager: Get help throughout your compliance journey, from taking inventory of your data protection risks to managing the complexities of implementing controls, staying current with regulations and certifications, and reporting to auditors.

“Joining MISA enhances our relationship with Microsoft and our commitment to being an information governance and compliance leader providing solutions for organizations to bring third-party data into Microsoft 365 archive,” said Charles Weeden, Managing Partner of 17a-4, LCC. “DataParser’s connectors will allow Microsoft 365 Compliance users to ingest content from various sources, such as Bloomberg, Slack, Symphony, Webex Teams and many others.”

Connectors and APIs to extend compliance capabilities

Organizations today face an intimidating amount of data to protect across disparate systems, both on-premises and in the cloud. That’s why Microsoft compliance solutions span information protection and governance, data-loss prevention, insider risk, eDiscovery, audit, and compliance management—including your non-Microsoft data.

Microsoft 365 compliance enables organizations to extend, integrate, accelerate, and support their compliance solutions with three key building blocks:

• Data connectors: Import, archive, and apply Microsoft 365 protection and governance capabilities to third-party data.
• APIs: Enable programmatic access to Microsoft 365 compliance capabilities.
• Power Automate Integrations: Gain seamless automation and workflow customizations.

All of these new capabilities exist within Microsoft’s integrated compliance platform. Meaning, customers only need to set compliance policies a single time, regardless of the data source.

“The Veritas Merge1 connector platform integration with M365 allows our joint customers to configure, connect, and capture a vast number of data sources from within the M365 compliance center. The integration makes it easy to quickly identify which data sources need to be captured, to configure connectivity to those data sources and to pull data into M365 all from within the Azure infrastructure. Our development teams have worked closely together for over 12 months to make sure the workflow is simple and the capabilities are robust. With the increase in global regulations over the past several years, our goal is to simplify compliance, and we believe we have achieved that by working together with Microsoft.”—David Scott, Sr. Director, Digital Compliance at Veritas Technologies

Microsoft Security lights the way

As the global pandemic forced millions into remote work last year, hackers took advantage and upped their game, as seen with the recent Solorigate attack. Many organizations saw their sensitive data created, viewed, and distributed across multiple fragmented platforms that increased the potential attack surface. Because we view security as part of the common good, we chose to take a proactive approach; shifting cybersecurity away from the shadows and into a place of innovation and empowerment.

“MISA has helped us promote successful integrations with Azure Security Graph API and Azure Active Directory, both now deeply embedded in Barracuda security solutions.”—Tim Jefferson, SVP Data, Networking, and Applications, Barracuda Networks

During Microsoft Ignite, March 2-4, 2021, you’ll see added investment in our security, compliance, and identity portfolio as we continue to innovate and create holistic solutions that support cultures of security for our customers and partners, based on four basic principles:

• Protect everything: Safeguard your entire organization with integrated security, compliance, and identity solutions built to work across platforms and cloud environments.
• Simplify the complex: Prioritize risks with unified management tools and strategic guidance created to maximize the human expertise inside your company.
• Catch what others miss: Enable AI, automation, and human expertise to help you detect threats quickly, respond effectively, and fortify your security posture.
• Grow your future: Gain the peace of mind that comes with a comprehensive security solution, empowering you to grow, create, and innovate across your business.

To learn more about upcoming big announcements at Microsoft Ignite this week, visit our latest blog posts:

• 4 Ways Microsoft Is Delivering Security for All in a Zero Trust World by Vasu Jakkal.
• Securing & Governing Data in a New Hybrid Work Reality by Alym Rayani.
• Microsoft Compliance joins the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) as we continue to extend the Microsoft Compliance ecosystem by Hammad Rajjoub.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website.  Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.