Energy Leader Cuts Governance Costs and Unlocks Secure Collaboration with Govern 365

Case Study

A Leading Energy and Resources Company Consolidates its Online Workspaces, Secures Internal and External Collaboration and Reduces Governance Overhead with Govern 365

Background

The company develops and deploys utility-scale energy storage solutions designed to transform the world's approach to sustainable energy storage. Unique to the industry, the company’s innovative technology portfolio delivers customized short and long duration energy storage solutions to help utilities, independent power producers, and large industrial energy users significantly reduce levelized energy costs while maintaining power reliability.

Challenges

The company has committed to Microsoft 365 for its collaboration and productivity needs and they needed a way to manage their M365 workloads. They needed features such as quick and easy provisioning & governance of their workspaces and secure collaboration for secure external sharing with partners, vendors and more.

Pain Points

• The documents are hosted in multiple repositories e.g., FileShare, Workday, Office etc.
  • Difficult to manage multiple applications and keep track of content.
  • They need to be consolidated into a single repository.
• The documents are to be shared with vendors, contractors and customersfor a certain timeline (e.g., 30 days) and access revocation when time expires.
  • Manual access control is tedious, and you lose control of any files that are downloaded.
• Difficult to manage granular access to content in multiple apps.
  • Some users need “Download but not EDIT”.
  • Other users need “view only”
• Cross-functional workspaces for internal usage are difficult to secure.
• Need the ability to create and use a hub site from workspace template and easily map data
• Certain custom functionalities are needed during provisioning, user management and governance like form field narratives, on-screen pop-up messages, alerts, additional attributes, and a few others.
• Being a public company, they needed to achieve relevant regulatory compliances.

Solution

Govern 365 conducted an in-depth review of the infrastructure, all M365 workloads, users, data and its usage, and the current security implementation and practices. The goal was to assess the current status of each component against Microsoft best practices and implement a solution that aligns with those best practices while also aligning with the company’s business requirement.

Govern 365 ensures a sprawl-free environment. It isn’t about restricting users to create containers; it is about striking the right balance between end-user empowerment and administrative control to manage the life cycle of the content in a hassle-free way. The more ownership and control end users have over their M365 collaboration environments, the more successful the M365 deployment will be.

Govern 365 is also a Zero-Trust Secure Collaboration and Compliance platform for Microsoft 365 that protects business’s sensitive information, while limiting future litigation and compliance exposure. In addition to using the standard functionalities of Govern 365, the following areas were customized to suit specific business needs of the organization.

• Forms
  • Workspace provisioning forms for SharePoint Online and Teams were tailored to the organization
  • Workspaces were clearly distinguished for internal and external sharing with precise narratives describing their intended usage as appropriate for the business users.
  • Additional attribute for Department Area as a drop-down item was introduced to associate the workspace with specific user groups.
• Templates
  • Corresponding templates for internal and external usage were defined clearly for its intended usage e.g., SharePoint Internal site template description was changed to state, “Create sites to share non-sensitive documents and information internally with company colleagues for rich co-authoring and change-tracking features.”
  • Communication templates were restricted to just a few people in Marketing, IT, Ops and all Corporate Communication (write access) teams.
  • Ability to add site to a hub site was introduced.
• Protection
  • Files can be shared externally only for a certain timeline (e.g., 30 days) and there is an automatically remove / revoke access once the time has elapsed.
  • Secure collaboration room templates were regrouped under internal and external secure collaboration.
  • Additional attribute of Domain list was added for external sharing. The public domains like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc., would automatically trigger an approval workflow with the user’s manager.
  • A default folder structure was created within the workspace automatically.
• SharePoint Refactoring
  • Structures were created for a possible migration to move files from the current data rooms to Govern 365
  • Permission configurations were adjusted to accommodate any implications on document versions and the controls that were there (who can see what versions are there and who can see the versions of those documents)while migrating the documents from other file storage.

Benefits

Govern 365 was commissioned with a quick turnaround time of only four weeks. The following were the major business benefits achieved.

• Self-provisioning of M365 workloads reducing IT overhead
• Ease of use and adoption with increased productivity
• More granular and secured collaboration including external stakeholders reducing business risk
• Consolidation of various products into M365 platform improving ROI significantly
• Continued post implementation product support for data and application maintenance resulted into robust business continuity

Please feel free to contact us for further details or any clarification.