EY Harps on Effective Collaboration for Improved Service Delivery

Gilbert Ekugbe

EY Microsoft 365 Services has emphasised the need for organisations to deploy effective collaborations to deliver improved services to their clients especially in a world that is fast tilting into a knowledge-based economy.

The Assistant Director, Technical Lead of EY Microsoft 365 Services, Usman Abubakar Ehimeakhe, in a statement said building a better working world rests on effective and efficient teamwork.

“We need strong security, but we also need great collaboration. Collaboration is a multifaceted process that requires exquisite attention to protecting not only internal EY data, but that of its clients, partners, and other external parties. The EY organization relies on trust among its stakeholders, so we must protect our data with the highest possible degree of integrity. That is one of the reasons why we use Microsoft solutions,” he stressed.

“The organization carefully protects that trust, which is why it focuses on making collaboration as secure as possible,” he averred.

Sharing his thoughts on how to safeguard collaboration, Ehimeakhe said three goals to safeguarding collaborations is to block oversharing of data, prevent sharing sensitive personal data, and control exfiltration. 

“Those goals seemed to clash with EY professionals’ need to collaborate with non-EY team members and desire to invite guests to use relevant applications and data with as close to the same streamlined workflow that professionals use with internal colleagues. EY professionals had begun using Microsoft 365 Groups, a feature that spans the Microsoft 365 applications for easy workgroup coordination, to collaborate with non-EY parties,” he added.

Finding a balance is an ongoing test for his team, pointing out that the challenge goes beyond the many people who need access to EY assets, but warned that constantly growing threat landscape demands constant vigilance and strict security measures. 

“Yet tens of thousands of clients and other external players require access for varying terms, creating a constantly shifting population whose access must be carefully orchestrated for the right assets at the right time,” he added.

The Assistant Director said the organisation did not need to buy additional data privacy management software from another vendor because the answer—Microsoft Purview Information Protection was already available in its Microsoft 365 E5 license, saying that when the COVID-19 pandemic struck early in the information protection rollout, EY teams worked with Microsoft to fast-track the rollout and safeguard online collaboration for the company’s professionals across the globe within days.

As a Technical leader of EY Microsoft 365 Services at EY Technology, Ehimeakhe’s role is all about finding the fine line between competing priorities. 

“It’s a constant dichotomy,” he says. “

He wondered how to make it easier for external users to join a collaboration group without compromising EY security, saying that Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention policies for asset labeling and classification would help solve the security concerns.

In his words: “EY teams’ strategy was to also use Microsoft Purview Information Protection to apply labels on data containers in Microsoft 365 applications, like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, and in Exchange email, extending privileges and restrictions on this data through downstream applications in Microsoft 365.”

Looking back on its collaboration deployment, the EY team checked every item on its list despite a global crisis, pointing out that by using Microsoft Purview Information Protection coupled with Azure governance, EY fulfilled all three of our guiding principles,”