Year in review 2024: M365 cybersecurity, Copilot and automation in focus
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At Syskit, our vision is clear: to empower IT teams, workspace owners, and end users with a scalable and easy-to-use SaaS platform for reporting, management, and governance of Microsoft 365, from workspace creation to its end of life.
We see a world where IT teams act as governance enablers within their organizations, delegating management and governance tasks to workspace owners, ensuring easier compliance and faster identification of potential security concerns.
In 2024, we took significant steps to bring this vision to reality, focusing on solving key challenges IT Teams are facing now – oversharing, workspaces sprawl, and storage optimization, all while enhancing the overall user experience for IT admins and end users with custom branding, dark mode, and custom report views. Check out our Syskit Point 2024 year-in-review video below to see some of our highlights.
Let’s explore how we addressed these challenges across the end-to-end lifecycle management of workspaces, which we define in three phases: Creation, Maintenance, and Disposal.
Workspace creation phase
Preventing sprawl and establishing foundations to mitigate oversharing
The creation phase is critical for preventing sprawl and setting the stage for mitigating oversharing down the line. Embedding best practices from the start, such as enforcing privacy settings and governance policies, helps organizations establish a strong foundation for compliance and security.
This year, we’ve improved our Provisioning by introducing:
- Integrations (API and Webhooks): Connecting Syskit Point to your existing provisioning processes ensures IT teams can ensure that the right governance policies and best practices are applied to the workspace from the moment it has been created while maintaining familiar interfaces for their end users.
- Create from existing workspaces: IT Teams can use existing workspaces to create templates that will copy channels, apps, and even content to ensure consistency and efficiency in workspace setup.
Workspace maintenance phase
Ensuring compliance and reducing oversharing
As much as we would like, we all know that no one has time to focus on everything, so being able to concentrate IT efforts on securing key, sensitive information is crucial in the maintenance phase. Our goal here is to:
- Help IT teams understand what matters most.
- Enable them to focus their limited efforts on high-priority areas.
- Empower them to delegate tasks to workspace owners for decisions where owners have the best context, such as determining access permissions, sensitivity, and privacy of their workspaces.
In 2024, we worked on improving the maintenance phase by adding:
Copilot Readiness tile
This dashboard is filled with good practices to help IT teams understand the most critical security issues in their environment. Regardless of whether your organization plans to roll out Copilot, this is where every IT team should start to focus their efforts and address the most pressing security concerns in their environment.
Sensitivity labels inventory reports
Sensitivity labels are critical for managing and protecting sensitive data across an organization, as well as tackling oversharing. With the new Sensitivity Labels Inventory report, IT teams gain visibility into label usage, identifying where labels have been applied down to the file level across the tenant.
Recertification for sensitivity, privacy, and metadata
While on the topic of sensitivity labels, IT teams can now ask workspace owners to provide or update key details such as sensitivity, privacy, and workspace metadata. This helps IT prioritize what workspaces they should focus on as well as fine-tune the application of governance policies through our rules engine, ensuring that the appropriate policies are applied to the workspace continuously.
Oversharing policies
We introduced three new policies to help IT teams tackle oversharing. These policies are all about helping IT teams understand which workspaces pose a higher risk of oversharing so that they can focus on them first.
Private Workspaces Shared with Everyone
Sharing a private workspace with large groups like ‘Everyone Except External users’ defeats the point of this workspace being private, as Everyone in the organization, including Copilot, will have access to its content. This policy allows IT to quickly understand what workspaces are at risk and automatically remove access for those large groups.
Workspaces with shadow users
Identifies workspaces where there are users that have access to content, but are not members of the workspace, enabling IT teams to remove that access.
Workspaces with too many members
Having too many members complicates permissions management and increases the chance that users who should not have access still have it. This policy detects workspaces exceeding a defined number of members, enabling IT teams to focus their efforts on those workspaces.
Disposal phase
Tackling sprawl through workspace archival and deletion
The disposal phase is essential for tackling sprawl and ensuring inactive or unnecessary workspaces don’t clutter your environment.
We improved the Disposal phase this year by making the Inactive Workspace Policy more flexible. IT teams can now apply different instances of the Inactive workspace policies to different workspaces, making the Disposal phase much more effective by asking the workspace owner to keep, archive, or delete the workspaces as soon as they are no longer needed.
IT teams can also leverage our rules engine and automatically apply different inactive workspace policies to different workspaces based on the conditions they have set up.
Last but not least, with the introduction of M365 Archive into the Inactive Workspaces Policy, IT teams can also save on storage costs when workspaces are archived.
Storage optimization
In addition to lifecycle management, we made significant strides in storage optimization this year. As the rapid growth of data continues, managing storage efficiently has never been more important. Key updates included:
- Tenant-wide storage metrics report: Providing visibility into storage trends and helping IT teams make informed decisions.
- Tenant-wide potential savings: Helping IT teams identify storage savings and prioritize cleanup efforts effectively.
- Bulk cleanup actions: Allowing admins to free up storage faster by removing redundant file versions across multiple workspaces.
- Automated versioning limits: Enabling continuous enforcement of file version limits, reducing storage consumption without manual intervention.
These tools have empowered our customers to reclaim significant amounts of storage exceptionally quickly, which helped them minimize and keep their costs under control.
Enhancing the IT admin experience
Finally, we enhanced the experience for IT admins with features designed to make Syskit Point more aligned with organizational branding. These included:
- Branding Options: Customizing the platform with your organization’s logo, colors, and themes.
- Dark Mode: Admit it – most of you like to work in the dark 😊.
- Custom report views: Allowing IT teams to tailor reports to their specific needs and save them for later use, ensuring quick access to critical insights.
Looking ahead
As we reflect on 2024, we’re proud of the progress we’ve made, but we’re even more excited about what’s to come. The challenges you face in managing Microsoft 365 environments continue to evolve, and so will Syskit Point. In 2025, we’ll keep listening, innovating, and partnering with you to deliver the solutions you need to succeed.
Thank you for being part of this journey. Your feedback, trust, and collaboration inspire us every day. Here’s to an even more successful 2025!
