1: Assess
Managing compliance is c.o.m.p.l.i.c.a.t.e.d. You have to operate under multiple varying standards, shift your regulatory landscape and take note of variations by both industry and country.

Get this – 47 percent of executives were unsure of what data standards their organizations had to comply with. That shows just how detailed this process is.

But you can simplify this journey with ongoing risk assessments, actionable insights, and streamlined compliance workflow.

Microsoft offers a Compliance Manager that can help with all of those things. You’ll want a Compliance Score, something that reflects your overall compliance across different platforms. For example, the responsibility you have when your IT is on the premises vs. the responsibility you have over data in the Cloud. The Compliance Manager will also give you a step-by-step guide to help you improve your business’ data protection capabilities.

2: Protect
You can’t protect something without knowing where it is. So before you can guard your sensitive data, you need to know where it resides, where it travels, and which portions of your data are going where. Classify, label, locate > PROTECT.

Easier said than done. In the modern workplace, corporate data has few travel limits. Something exacerbated by something that also helps us: the increase of mobility and cloud services.

So with data out there in so many places, you’re going to want a single, simple interface to help you keep track of it all. Microsoft 365.

3: Respond
It sounds reactive, but it’s proactive. And we don’t mean responding to a breach. We mean responding to all of the other requests that happen before you get to that point.

What we mean by this, is responding to the routine AI maintenance requests. This helps you pinpoint your most relevant data – so you can reduce the amount of data you need to review.

Microsoft 365 has a rich, built-in, platform-wide tool to help you search and discover your most important data. The biggest thing this helps with: since it’s interface-wide, you don’t have to continuously copy your data to other spots, which can pose another threat and violate your compliance demands. This helps you reduce risk, reduce cost, and review and annotate before you officially export/send your data off.

The post How to achieve a forward-thinking compliance strategy: Three steps appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

How important is it to *plan for a security breach?

• You don’t want your first time fighting a security breach to be when it’s actually happening when you’re under stress and everything is on the line.
• Several things need to be planned in advance. How do you know a breach is actually happening? Who are the first people who need to be made aware? What’s the proper triage response?

When do you spread the news about an attack? And how do you do it?

• Compare a ransomware attack to a police investigation. Not all of the information is known right away. If you say too much about what’s happening, and to the wrong people, it could do more harm than good.
• Be transparent and clear to the people who DO need to know.
• “Don’t say anything you wouldn’t stake your job on, because you might have to.”
• Find the balance. Divulge information that could help customers who may be impacted by the breach.

A real-world example of what to do during a breach?

• Under Armour: My Fitness Pal phone app was hacked, hitting 150 million users. Passwords were stolen. The company stood with corporate values – they wanted to be transparent. Responded to breach in four days. Under Armour stayed focused on the customer, and coordinated quickly internally. The well-oiled decision-making process allowed them to respond so quickly with minimal collateral damage.

What can companies proactively put in place to help mitigate a cyberattack?

• Breaking attacks down into categories related to severity, and giving your company the ability to see what those attacks look like. That way, they’re easier to spot – AND the decision-making process is expedited.
• Make sure you have visibility into your network, so you can see who is doing what where, why and how. And don’t forget about your remote partners when it comes to this point.

The post Pros Explain How To Recover From A Security Breach appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

When it comes to business, social networks can provide secure spaces where teams in different offices, cities, states or countries can communicate and collaborate on projects in real time. They allow people who may never meet to discuss project details, divide and conquer tasks, discuss clients’ needs, and generally come together to accomplish a common goal. As an added benefit, teams who work together regularly can also use their company’s enterprise social network to get to know one another, learn about each other’s strengths, understand how they think, and bond as a team – which will, in turn, create a stronger team that creates stronger work.

Like social networks for the general population, social media for business organizations begins with being social. They allow real-time communication, and usually include a playful element or two, like emojis that can help message recipients infer tone. But enterprise social media also offers a slew of business-appropriate features and functions that can help teams work more efficiently and effectively. Four things that your teams can benefit from the most include:

• Document Collaboration: With the power to share and discuss documents as a team, as well as the ability to edit and co-author documents directly within your social network, this feature allows teams to create more insightful, inclusive, and meaningful deliverables. It also gives teams the unique ability to edit and share items on the fly – as they’re discussed within the group.
• Internal Groups & External Collaborators: Internal groups allow your teams to create a space that’s just for them – and joined by invitation only. It’s a place where they can discuss work, as a team, and tackle projects and initiatives together. In addition to internal groups, some enterprise social networks allow your teams to invite outside client representatives, vendors, consultants, contractors, etc. into the space so that you can all discuss and collaborate on projects either on a limited or an on-going basis.
• Search & Discovery: Some business social networks allow users to search throughout their system for experts, conversations, and files that are relevant to their work. This can help teams reduce the about of duplicate work, use best practices, and work more efficiently. In addition to search, discovery features that allow users to stay abreast of what’s happening within the company (in general) can help your teams find people, information, and groups that are relevant to them, their clients and/or their interests. Through the discovery process, users might meet mentors, and find areas for cross collaboration, etc., which can help them not only grow professionally, but improve their work.
• Seamless Integration: Regardless of how highly praised an enterprise social media solution may be, if it won’t support your current tools, including your word processing and presentation programs, then it’s probably not the right solution for you. After all, the point of purchasing a solution like this is to streamline communication and encourage collaboration, and if your teams have to use “tricks” in order to get your programs to work with your platform, it will cost them time and slow down your process.

In addition to the features that your team will use every day, it’s the one feature that your team won’t see that can truly make social networking for any business a success or failure – and that’s security. With an enterprise social network that encrypts data at all times, at-rest and in-transit, and includes multi-factor authentication to enhance identity protection, you can ensure that not only is your data protected, but your employees are protected, too.

6th Street Consulting is a Microsoft technology firm specializing in user productivity and collaboration on SharePoint and Office365.  Our biggest differentiator is we put business before technology in creating solutions tailored fit to your organization.

For additional information please contact:

Michelle Hollis

michelle.hollis@CulverG.com

(310) 694-3844

The post Ramp Up Your Enterprise Social Network appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Business process automation is integral to any growing business. Let’s look at how SharePoint can help business’ of all sizes streamline, automate, and transform processes with rich forms, workflows, and custom mobile apps.

Gather and manage data and files

SharePoint lists collect data—just like you might in Excel—and are easy to share and manage on an intranet. More than ten million custom lists are in use across Office 365—from simple lists like contacts and tasks to lists that power mission-critical business operations for large enterprises. Use Microsoft PowerApps to build custom forms to view, create, and modify data and files.

Automate repetitive tasks

Free yourself and your team from the time you spend on recurring manual team and organizational processes. Use the simple, visual designer in Flow to lay out the steps. You can do everything in Flow from configuring alerts and approvals to modeling complex, multistage processes.

Connect to and integrate data sources and services

When your process needs data from other sources and services, Flow lets you automate data exchange, synchronize files, and more. Use Flow, for example, to copy information entered by a sales team in Microsoft Dynamics to a SharePoint list used by operations. Flow also integrates with on-premises and third-party services.

Build apps that transform your business

With PowerApps, you can create, without writing code, apps that interact with data in SharePoint lists and libraries, as well as other cloud and on-premises sources. Use PowerApps to create digital experiences that take advantage of technology like cameras on mobile phones to work in innovative ways.

The post Do Less So You Can Achieve More with SharePoint appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Late last year Microsoft announced the general availability of a new solution purpose-built for small and medium-sized businesses with up to 300 employees. Available worldwide today, Microsoft 365 Business includes the Office 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools, as well as device management and security tools to safeguard company information across Windows 10 PCs, mobile devices, and apps. It is an integrated solution designed to simplify IT for small and medium-sized businesses.

Become a modern workplace

Today’s modern, global workplace is changing, which brings tremendous opportunities and challenges for businesses of all sizes. Businesses must meet the needs of a five-generation workforce, contend with an increasingly complex cyberthreat landscape, and innovate quickly to meet evolving customer expectations.

At the same time, small and medium-sized customers need solutions that are easy to manage and maintain. Often small business owners find technology options to be complex and costly, leading many to make do with a patchwork of services or defer investments altogether. Such approaches compromise business productivity and introduce security vulnerabilities, which may be one reason why 43 percent of all cyber-attacks last year targeted companies with fewer than 100 employees.

Safeguard your business

Microsoft 365 Business is built to deliver the productivity tools and security services businesses need in a single, simple-to-manage product. It safeguards company information, extending security across users, apps, and devices. It helps ensure PCs are up to date and secure, helping prevent security vulnerabilities that cyber-thieves often exploit. It also provides protection for company information across devices, with the ability to remove company data from lost or stolen devices.

Empower your people

Microsoft 365 Business delivers the productivity and collaboration tools businesses need to help their people be their most productive. It includes the suite of Office 365 productivity and collaboration apps, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as Outlook for email; SharePoint and OneDrive for sharing files with customers, co-workers, and suppliers; and Microsoft Teams for chat-based teamwork.

Simplify your IT management

Microsoft 365 Business is designed to reduce the complexity and costs of managing technology for businesses and their IT partners. It offers simple setup and management, so business owners and their teams can put more of their time and energy toward building their businesses. From a single console, you can quickly set up new employees, configure device security policies, and manage user identity and access, as well as ensure all your people are on the most up-to-date versions of Windows 10 and Office. And the single per-user, per-month subscription streamlines costs and simplifies management.

6th Street Consulting  is committed to helping empower and safeguard small and medium-sized businesses across the globe. To learn more about Microsoft 365 Business, contact us!

The post Empower Your Team and Safeguard Your Business with Microsoft 365 Business appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps are on general availability and enables people to automate workflows and quickly build custom apps that suit their specific needs. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced integration of SharePoint with Microsoft Flow, enabling you to create and launch flows directly from a SharePoint list. They also announced that native integration of PowerApps and SharePoint would drive rich new experiences to continue reinventing business processes with modern document libraries and modern lists in SharePoint.

We know that tight integration is essential to unlocking productivity gains for the digital workplace. Accessing data from mobile devices was a first step. Bringing business processes to the same site for team documents and data is next. That’s why SharePoint is a great home for your enterprise business applications.

Upcoming integration with SharePoint

PowerApps will be fully integrated into the SharePoint web experience. PowerApps provides a great mobile experience, and now that experience is connected to the data stored in SharePoint lists. Soon you’ll be able to integrate PowerApps as the default in-browser experience for any SharePoint modern list.

PowerApps embedded in a SharePoint list.

This means:

• You’ll be able to launch PowerApps directly from the SharePoint mobile app.
• Modern document libraries will be made available as a data source for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.
• For Microsoft Flow, you’ll be able to run any flow on demand for a specific document or list item, in addition to waiting for an automated trigger to fire.
• Using the data gateway, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow will work with on-premises data in SQL and SharePoint as simply as cloud-based data.
• Deeper integration of Power BI with SharePoint Online. Business process requires more than data and automation. Power BI has been a leader in visualization analytics, and soon you’ll be able to embed visualizations and charts from Power BI directly into a SharePoint team site.

The post SharePoint Welcomes PowerApps and Microsoft Flow appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Transform business process

SharePoint enables you, your team and your organization to streamline tasks, automate workflows and integrate processes seamlessly into your work—on any device and from anywhere you work.

Create custom SharePoint forms and digital experiences with PowerApps

Starting this summer, you will be able to use Microsoft PowerApps to easily create custom forms and rich digital experiences that surface right in the context of a SharePoint list or library. Users can then create, view and interact with data using your custom form or experience, rather than default SharePoint forms.

Create custom forms inside SharePoint lists and libraries with no code using PowerApps.

This is a significant milestone for both SharePoint and PowerApps, as it empowers any user to drive transformation of team and organizational processes.

Simple approval flows built in to SharePoint libraries

Microsoft continues to deepen integration of SharePoint and Microsoft Flow. New built-in approval flows let you send any document for approval with a custom message. The recipient can approve the request directly from a rich, actionable email message, so approval and feedback can be given without leaving your inbox.

Approval flows, built in to SharePoint, send a rich, actionable email message.

Inform and engage employees

An intranet lets you communicate to people—keeping them informed of news and information. And it enables you to communicate with people—to engage employees and foster open conversation. It is this engagement that is fundamental to driving digital transformation and culture change.

Reach a broad audience with SharePoint communication sites

As the next step toward ushering in the next generation of intranets, Microsoft announced SharePoint communication sites—coming this summer. A communication site is a beautiful, dynamic site that lets you reach a broad audience to keep the organization informed and engaged. Communication sites look great on the web, on a PC or Mac, on mobile browsers and in the SharePoint app.

Easily create beautiful intranet sites to reach a broad audience across your organization.

While your team site lets you share within your group as you’re working, a communication site lets your group share broadly and communicate its message across the organization. News published on a communication site surfaces on SharePoint home in Office 365 and on SharePoint mobile to all users who have access to the site.

Communication sites can be created in seconds. You can configure the default web parts on your site’s pages to tell your story. You can customize page layout with new multi-column sections and drag-and-drop authoring with a range of richly functional web parts, including an image gallery, interactive Bing maps, videos from a Microsoft Stream channel, and a new events web part. Add the Yammer web part to solicit feedback and foster conversation, right in the context of a communication site.

To learn more about communication sites, read “Reach your audience via SharePoint communication sites in Office 365” and watch An overview of SharePoint communication sites. To learn more about business processes, read “Reinventing business processes in SharePoint” and watch Zero code business process apps in SharePoint with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

The post Accelerate Your Digital Transformation: Transform Business Process appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.