5 Most Important Governance Aspects for Microsoft Copilot

21 days ago Microsoft announced the public availability of their take on what many consider the biggest tech innovation in the last decade: AI

While Microsoft Copilot is gradually rolled out in many organizations in light of the overall AI hype, some are already looking past the obvious benefits and into the potential downsides of putting a powerful AI at the fingertips of your end users.

 The power of every LLM-based technology lies in the information it can access and crunch for you. Access management is a core functionality for every governance approach and thus also deeply baked into our M365 governance tool Rencore Governance.

Here are the top 5 governance aspects to consider when considering introducing Microsoft Copilot:

Declutter your Microsoft 365 tenant 

• Locate orphaned resources
• Manage Communication & Collaboration sprawl
• Improve and automate lifecycle management

Keep control of your Copilot license costs and active usage

• Identify unused licenses
• Uncover unassigned licenses (e.g. to disabled users)

Prevent internal over-sharing or check for broken permissions 

• Notify users with widely (anonymously) shared assets 
• Identify unwanted content hubs (e.g. SharePoint libraries) 

Automate operational processes 

• Policy monitoring and dynamic & scheduled reporting 
• Resolving policy violations with concrete actions according to Change Management Plans (inform by Emails or Teams Messages as well as disabling sharing of files automatically) 
• Repair broken Life Cycle Management of Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint 

Enable users to review content access and permissions 

• Continuously review access to your tenant's data (SharePoint, Teams, Power Automate, Power Apps) in a Microsoft Teams App for End Users  
• Easily off-board users from Workspaces or change their roles  

Templates and provisioning 

• Manage SharePoint and Teams provisioning requests from one Teams App for End Users   
• Automate Teams and SharePoint site creation 
• Create provisioning templates, use Purview Sensitivity Labels and PnP

In both football and governance, considerable time and effort should go into preparing the playing field. Before indulging in Microsoft Copilot, you should make sure that your organization's tenant is fit for this new step.

Over to you

If you are considering Microsoft Copilot - or have already made the move - and one or more of the above points make you uneasy, you might want to consider implementing some AI governance strategies. Our tool Rencore Governance allows you to define and enforce specific governance policies that will enable you and your end users to use Microsoft Copilot to its full potential while keeping it under control.