South Africa is one of the latest countries to implement strict legislation around data privacy in the form of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI Act). The POPI Act sets the new benchmark for the processing of South African’s personal data by both public and private bodies within and beyond the country’s borders. Any and all organizations conducting business on South African soil must ensure that their information security practices are compliant with the rules and regulations seen in the POPI Act.
Defend and protect personal data in your care
Across the globe and South Africa, violations in data privacy are coming with increasingly stricter penalties, making it crucial for organizations to implement robust compliance solutions.
Although this may seem like an intimidating process, Microsoft’s compliance solutions will ensure POPI compliance and mitigate risk. It is crucial to balance the pervasive nature of collaboration tools with the compliance of POPIA, GDPR and other data privacy regulations.
Collaboration applications can simplify the process of staff members to unknowingly share protected information with unauthorized parties, or even knowingly with hostile intentions. Whether it’s the one or the other, your company is the one that’s going to be held accountable
Fortunately, Microsoft provides multiple security and compliance solutions that will ensure your organization never lands in hot water.
Microsoft’s robust compliance solution will help you:
- Locate all personal data within your collaborative networks and digital storage units, including on-premises shared files and cloud sharing applications such as Microsoft 365.
- Automatically classify documents based on the presence of personal or other sensitive data governed by POPI and other regulatory guidelines.
- Put in place business rules with relevant restrictions regarding classified documents in any from - printed documents, emails - to prevent data bleeding.
- Implement strict yet streamlined solutions that will protect data and documents accessed and shared on collaborative platforms such as Microsoft Teams.
- Restrict collaboration between users in different geographical locations or subsidiaries to meet regulatory guidelines (information barriers).
- Automatically regulate and modify security controls to transforming risk profiles of data as users and third parties access and collaborate across multiple locations, organizational and geographic boundaries, and devices.
- Track access to regulated personal data for auditing and compliance purposes.
To learn more about Microsoft’s robust compliance solutions, you can download our latest Ebook - “Microsoft 365: The POPI Act, GDPR and Compliance”.
For more information, please get in touch with Jolene Strydom on jolenes@firsttechnology.co.za or call us directly on 021 525 7000.