Automate lifecycle management in Microsoft 365
Any Microsoft 365 environment will become cluttered and unsafe without proper management and governance processes.
Throughout the workspace lifecycle, each phase brings about its challenges – from workspace creation, to managing access, memberships, sharing, and cleanup.
Without proper management solutions in place, this makes day-to-day work for admins challenging, to say the least. And to make matters worse, the workspaces are often unstructured, their purpose is difficult to decipher, and they may pose a security risk.
Challenge: Disorder in your Microsoft 365 environment
The challenges with lifecycle management are all connected and can form a vicious cycle where your IT team gets busier each day, and your data gets less secure.
Overburdened IT team
When creating new workspaces or requesting access, your users will get confused about access and permission rights, especially external collaborators’.
This often leads IT teams to adopt a zero-trust strategy – they disable self-service, opting for a more complex ticketing system instead.
Lacking the context for different teams’ admission rights, your IT team will spend too much time solving support ticket issues for every single workspace creation and access request.
Uncontrolled sprawl
Or the IT team will allow everyone to do what they want – which results in other challenges, such as workspace overflow and security threats.
Your users might get carried away and create a bunch of teams, sites, and channels without ever using them again, causing unnecessary sprawl.
Users create duplicate workspaces, which end up unused and unstructured. Consequently, users increasingly work harder to find what they’re looking for, negatively affecting productivity.
Security threats
Even after project completion, external users will remain in your tenant for an unspecified period, still able to access your sensitive data.
Accessing sensitive information happens instantly, and it can be hard to find out who’s behind it quickly. And the consequences can be expensive.
Solution: Multi-pronged approach with Syskit Point
There is a way to solve these challenges and create a virtuous cycle in your Microsoft 365 environment. It takes a couple of easy and logical steps that support each other and help you have a well-structured and safe environment.
Automated workspace provisioning
Syskit Point’s automated workspace creation empowers admins to significantly reduce IT support tickets and boost tenant security.
Admins can configure easy-to-use predefined templates that ensure that each workspace has a clearly defined purpose and sensitivity and apply governance rules right from the start – according to owner specifications.
Syskit Point ensures your sensitive data stays protected throughout the lifecycle.
Access requests
With Syskit Point, you can also empower your end users and workspace owners to manage workspace access requests through an easy-to-use self-service interface in the Teams app.
They know their workspaces the best – who is collaborating on what, who should be added to a certain project, or who should switch teams.
All an admin has to do is set up policies in the background to keep everything streamlined and under control.
As a result, end users will no longer need your IT team’s help to join workspaces. From the Workspace Center in the Point Teams app, users can easily request access to various workspaces and perform different management actions.
Simplify the process by giving your end users the visibility they need to manage workspace access without contacting IT. The benefits include reduced sprawl, and increased efficiency for the entire organization.
Collaborative governance
With business users, managers, and content owners empowered to make changes in an automated, secure environment, your IT team can catch its breath and focus on improving and developing other tools to drive your business forward.
Syskit Point lets regular business users perform access reviews in their workspaces at any time – check members, content, sharing, and easily manage all of it.
After project completion, they can quickly remove guest users and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data.
In addition, they can also easily clean up the no longer required workspaces and stop sprawl in its tracks
The Syskit Point advantage
With Syskit Point, you can quickly and easily:
- Create multiple provisioning templates with custom approval scenarios for business users to choose from when creating new workspaces.
- Set a periodical review policy for content owners with external sharing in their workspaces – confirm whether the specified level of sharing is okay, and change or remove it if not.
- Empower content owners to check their workspaces at any time, see members, content, and how it is being shared.
- Set up custom policies for ownership, guest expiration, orphaned workspaces cleanup, and access requests.
- Empower content owners to configure alerts for their teams, groups, and sites without any additional administrative rights.
- Enable your admins to define a custom access request approval process – the users included, and if it should be automated.
- Specify what kind of access users can request by workspace type.
- Give your users an intuitive workspace center in the Teams app where they can see, search, and request access to workspaces.
- Set up policies that will help you clean up orphaned workspaces.
- You can also integrate Syskit Point with your existing provisioning process via API or webhooks.
Fast, responsive, helpful, friendly, and open for suggestions – that’s how I would describe the Syskit team. And the tool – works flawlessly from day one, giving us great governance and security benefits for our Teams!
Robert Preskar Head of IT projects, ERP, and digitalization at Rimac Group
Automate your Microsoft 365 lifecycle management
With Syskit Point, you are only a few simple steps away from creating a virtuous cycle and a well-structured and safe environment.
You can try it for free and get 21 days to explore the full scope of the platform’s features. No credit card required and it only takes a few minutes.