Balancing Security and Productivity in Microsoft 365 During Times of Crisis – Part 1

How Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Identity Governance can assist your organization in responding quickly to new collaboration needs while maintaining security and governance. 

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic sent much of the world into a frenzy. With businesses concerned for the safety and wellbeing of their employees and customers, and many governments strongly advising social distancing, the need to ramp-up the remote workforce went from a distant goal to a top priority almost overnight. One of the many groups greatly impacted by this new priority is the group of people responsible for collaboration platforms such as Microsoft 365. The need to quickly enable remote workers has made it seem necessary for many groups to ignore or postpone best practices and security considerations in favor of business continuity. Azure AD’s Identity Governance is one set of tools designed to help strike the balance between security and productivity, enabling quick turnaround on required resources while providing checks and balances to mitigate risk.

What is Azure AD Identity Governance? 

Simply put, Azure AD Identity Governance is about “ensuring the right people have the right access at the right time.” More specifically, it is a set of 3 primary tools designed to control and audit access to company resources.   

Entitlement Management is about creating Access Packages to control the scope and duration of access to groups, applications, and SharePoint sites.