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Compliance is Crucial for Businesses to Achieve Optimum Output in the New Normal

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By Mohamed El Nemr, Modern Workplace and Security Business Group Lead for Microsoft Middle East and Africa Emerging Markets.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many consistent challenges have been experienced by businesses. With so many remote workers, people are creating, sharing and storing data in new ways – fostering productivity, but this has also introduced new risks. And this is not just an assumption. A recent Microsoft poll revealed that providing secure remote access to resources, apps, and data is the key concern for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs).

With penalties and fines for non-compliance set at a maximum of €20 million or 4% of a company’s annual global turnover – in an industry that is ever changing, it is in the best interests of organisations to remain continually complaint.

As such, to assist companies in better protecting their data, mitigate risk and address compliance regulations, especially in this time of flexible work, Microsoft has announced several new capabilities across Microsoft Compliance.

General availability of Microsoft Compliance Manager: addressing industry regulations and custom requirements

In addition to the talent shortage and complexity of compliance management, customers also face the need to comply with an increased volume and frequency of regulations, with hundreds of updates a day globally to thousands of industry and regional regulations. Additionally, the complexity of these regulations has made it challenging for organisations to know which specific actions to take and the impact of these.

Compliance Manager offers a vast library of assessments for expanded regulatory coverage, built-in automation to detect tenant settings, and step-by-step guidance to help businesses manage risk. The feature also translates complex regulatory requirements to specific technical controls and through compliance score, provides a quantifiable measure of risk assessment – bringing together the existing Compliance Manager and Compliance Score solutions in the Microsoft 365 compliance center.

The Compliance Manager provides a comprehensive set of templates for creating assessments, to help organisations comply with national, regional and industry-specific requirements governing the collection and use of data. Local laws including the Kenya Data Protection Act and Nigeria Data Protection Regulation, Mauritius Data Protection Act and Ghana Data Protection Act have been mapped into the Compliance Manager tool to facilitate local compliance.

New connectors and APIs: extending Microsoft compliance capabilities to third-party apps

To provide greater visibility into an organisation’s data, wherever it lives, new connectors have been made available that can pull data from other apps into Microsoft Compliance (including Microsoft Information Protection, Insider Risk Management, Communication Compliance, and eDiscovery) to help companies reason over, protect and govern that data.

The ability to access Microsoft Compliance solutions and integrate these with existing applications and services that are part of broader compliance, security, and operations (SecOps) ecosystems has become a growing need across the board. As such, new API’s have also been announced – forming part of the broader Microsoft Graph ecosystem:

·        Teams Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API: Allows third-party products to integrate and enable data loss prevention capabilities for Microsoft Teams.

·        eDiscovery API: Allows for the automation of Advanced eDiscovery processes, including case creation and the entire legal hold notification workflow to communicate with custodians involved in a case.

·        Teams Export API: Allows the export of Teams Messages along with attachments, emojis, GIFs, and user @Mentions. This API supports polling daily Teams messages and allows archiving of deleted messages up to 30 days.

Protecting native and third-party cloud apps through unified data loss prevention (DLP)

Having the right data protection and governance approach is critical to not only addressing regulatory compliance but also to mitigating risks around data leakage.

The extension of Microsoft data loss prevention solutions to Microsoft Cloud App Security is a new capability that extends the integration for DLP policy-based content inspection across connected applications such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Webex, One Drive and SharePoint.

This extension of Microsoft data loss prevention solutions to MCAS will help users to remain continuously compliant when using popular native and third-party cloud apps and helps to ensure sensitive content is not accidentally or inappropriately shared.

Expanded security and compliance capabilities built directly into Microsoft Teams

With Microsoft Teams usage growing with the shift to remote work, organisations are looking for seamless integration in order to keep their data and employees secure and compliant. With the volume of business conversations occurring round the clock in the solution, additional security and compliance features have also been added.

Insider Risk Management now offers native integration with Microsoft Teams to securely coordinate, collaborate, and communicate on a case with relevant stakeholders in the organization. When an Insider Risk management case is created, a private Microsoft Teams team will also be created and bound to the case for its duration. This Microsoft Teams team will, by default, include insider risk management analysts and investigators, and additional contributors such as HR and Legal, can be added as appropriate.

Auto-apply retention policies for Microsoft Teams meeting recording allow you to retain and delete recordings with in-place governance, which means the retention policies apply wherever the recordings are saved without the need to export elsewhere. When the rollout for this begins in October, we will provide guidance on how you can leverage Keyword Query Languages to create retention policies for Teams meeting recordings.

Advanced eDiscovery supports live documents and links shared in Microsoft Teams. The feature also automatically collects documents from a storage location, such as SharePoint or OneDrive, to pull the content into an eDiscovery case. The attachments are collected, reviewed, and exported along with the Teams conversations so customers don’t need to manually find and collect the documents one by one.

Customer Key support for Teams: Microsoft helps keep Teams data safe by encrypting it while at rest in Microsoft datacenters. This has been extended to enable customers to add a layer of encryption using their own keys for Teams, similar to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive. 

We are well into a new era of business which has already brought with it the need for new processes and prerequisites. These new capabilities will only go a long way in ensuring that Microsoft customers across the continent and globally remain compliant.

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How MTN’s Endorsement Changed 17-year Davido’s Musical Career

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Davido’s reputation as “Omo baba Olowo” (son of a rich man) has never been in question but even the wealthy have been known to enjoy a financial boost from time to time. The Afro-pop star revealed he received his big boost as a teenager when telecommunications giant, MTN Nigeria came calling with a N20 million naira endorsement deal.  

“I remember when MTN, a telecommunication company, came, and they were like they want to do endorsement, but then he (Dad) was like how much, and I said 20 million. I was like I’m 17. Nobody (had) seen that kind of money. Wow, this is from music, and it’s off like two songs, of course.”

Davido further explained that the deal came at the right time as it proved to be the incentive needed to convince his multi-billionaire father, Dr Adedeji Adeleke of the potential in the music business.

“I’m like, ‘Daddy see, we can do this’. “He built me a studio and gave me some money to run my stuff and did my first album, and it came out really really successful.”

Davido was the face of MTN Pulse between 2012 and 2016 and during that time the pop star dropped hit songs like Aye, Skelewu, and Gobe to mention a few whilst picking up a number of awards along the way.

Davido has since risen to become one of Africa’s biggest musical export, selling out various venues across the world including the O2 Arena in London, performing at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, earning billions of streams across multiple platforms and collaborating with some of the world’s biggest artistes. He recently released his fourth studio album “Timeless” which peaked at number 2 on the World Album charts.

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ITU Targets $100bn By 2026 To Accelerate Global Digitalization

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The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) issued yesterday a worldwide appeal calling to increase the value of pledges for digitalizing the world from the current $30 billion to $100 billion by 2026. 

The appeal by the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies includes a focus on raising the level of resources for universal and meaningful connectivity and digital transformation in the world’s least developed countries (LDCs). 

The announcement of the target was made on World Telecommunications and Information Society Day, observed annually to mark the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention and ITU’s founding in 1865. 

ITU secretary-general, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, “Tech is at the top of the global agenda, but the benefits of digital technology are still out of reach for too many people,” said “If we are serious about digitalizing the world in a way that is meaningful and sustainable, we must take action to accelerate digital transformation for everyone.” 

In 2023, ITU’s anniversary is focused on empowering the least developed countries through information and communication technologies using the Partner2Connect Digital Coalition and its online pledging platform. 

The ITU appeal to the public and private sectors encompasses a campaign launched in February 2022 by Partner2Connect to mobilize direct funding or other contributions for connectivity projects in countries registering the lowest on development.

Of the $30 billion already pledged overall, Partner2Connect has identified commitments worth $12 billion to bring the LDCs online as quickly as possible.   

The United Nations defines LDCs as countries that have low levels of income and face severe structural impediments to sustainable development. The call for resources, which comes as the UN strives to rescue its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, stresses the need for the globe’s digital transformation to be environmentally friendly. 

“The digital revolution is a defining force of our era,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. “As the Internet becomes ever more central to value creation and innovation, least developed countries risk falling further behind. We must dramatically improve accessibility and inclusivity and eliminate the digital divide.” 

According to ITU data, 2.7 billion people worldwide were offline in 2022. The digital connectivity divide separating the least developed countries from the rest of the world is widening on key factors such as access, digital skills and affordability. 

Though the globe’s 46 least developed countries are home to almost one-third of the world’s offline population, the Internet is considered to be affordable in only two of those countries. 

At the event marking ITU’s anniversary in Geneva, ITU Secretary-General Bogdan-Martin announced SDG Digital Day, scheduled for 17 September in New York in advance of the UN SDG Summit to review the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The SDG Digital Day, powered by ITU on behalf of the UN system, will showcase high-impact, sustainable, digitally based solutions that have a game-changing potential to accelerate progress on the SDGs. 

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SmartParcel Introduces Tech-driven Parcel Delivery Service across Nigeria

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SmartParcel, Nigeria and Africa first innovative logistics parcel solution provider has began deployment across strategic locations in Lagos and across Nigeria.

The co-founder/COO of the company, Benjamin Adeyemo spoke during the opening of the Lagos Island Smart Locker locations at Mandilas Building and Andora Best Shopper Mart on Broad Street.

He said, “Businesses and individuals on the Island and across Nigeria now have a new, easy to use, and convenient delivery service powered by smart and innovative technology.”

Adeyemo noted that the easy-to-use solution aims to solve logistics and delivery challenges by creating seamless, smart lockers positioned in strategic locations where users can send and receive items meant for them.  

“The first step is to download the SmartParcel app on Google PlayStore or Apple store. Sign up to get your unique Locker code. The depositor will then use the code to deposit his/her item in the Locker. SmartParcel will then assign a trusted rider to pick up and deliver the item at the recipient closest or preferred SmartParcel collection centre.

 “he recipient gets an instant notification when after the rider drops the parcel at the SmartParcl Locker. The depositor also gets an alert after the parcel is collected by the recipient. Adeyemo further said that the businesses on Lagos Island will enjoy a maximum of 12 hours delivery circle,” he added.

Speaking at the launch, a business owner, Aisha, who uses the service said, she discovered “I discovered SmartParcel at VGC. I downloaded the app “Smartparcelng” and I was signed to the service within minutes. I contacted my client and told him about the SmartParcel locker which coincidentally happened to be very close to his house and he was able to retrieve his item easily just by using the code.”

SmartParcel currently has location partnership with NIPOST that allows this innovative service to be enjoyed by all Nigerians across the 774 local government areas of the country.

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