Maintaining Compliance with SharePoint 2016

In every corporation, there are rules, rules, and more rules. Internal rules mandate how workers work and systems conform; external rules mandate everything from product quality to working conditions. And the entities that establish those rules often want reports about how well your company is following them. Fortunately for Microsoft SharePoint 16 users, compliance with and reporting on the ever-growing myriad of rules are automatically occurring as the work gets done.

Maintaining Internal Compliance

Keeping track of both your corporate records and the data contained within them protects the uniqueness of your enterprise. With SharePoint, managing that task is made easy because its records management feature is designed to organize and coordinate the process from document generation to destruction:

• It begins by determining which information formats should be considered “records.” Records are evidence of corporate activities; they memorialize foundational understandings, set rules and regulations, and track transactions. Ergo, records management is often the most critical aspect for proper governance of almost every organization.

Then it maintains those records according to a variety of needs:

• To establish common ground across sectors. A uniform records base keeps all workers on the same governance page.
• As a foundation for growth. Knowing where you’ve come from helps you to understand where you’re going.
• As evidence of activities, both good and bad. Reports drawn from records can demonstrate compliance with internal and external rules; they can also reveal where rules have been broken or ignored.

SharePoint 16 provides the platform that maintain automatic and accurate records management so you can always find the information when you need it as well as control who else has access to it.

Maintaining External Compliance

To be competitive today, your organization must become and stay in compliance with both national and international regulations. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) sets the standards for thousands of industrial applications and complying with those standards not only keeps the business and its consumer’s safe, but it also represents excellent corporate management, too. SharePoint 16 provides the tools your enterprise needs to comply with the vast menu of regulations listed within the ISO’s internationally accepted body of standards.

For example, America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) manages the health, safety, and security of the country’s food and medical supplies; companies that work within those industries must maintain compliance with those rules or face significant fines and penalties.

One of those regulations is found in the Code of Federal Regulations at Title 21, Part 11 (CFR 21, Part 11), which governs the business practices, including records management, of organizations involved in the food and drug sectors. The regulation mandates that when enterprise records (including signatures) are held in an electronic form (which almost all are these days), then those relevant corporate records must be “accurate, authentic, trustworthy, reliable, confidential, and equivalent to paper records and handwritten signatures on paper.” Complying with this one rule requires that the records system:

• be auditable to prove authentication;
• be validated as compliant, and
• retains a document trail that demonstrates both the methods and accuracy of compliance assertions.

SharePoint 16 has all the essential tools needed to become and remain compliant with CFR 21, Part 11, so companies that use SharePoint 16 are assured that they are and will remain compliant so long as they depend on those SharePoint tools. Relying on SharePoint for CFR 21, Part 11 compliance solves several corporate concerns:

• It eliminates management stress about whether the enterprise is maintaining mandated standards so that those leaders can focus on other core initiatives.
• It reduces the financial burden of maintaining compliance by coordinating the compliance effort into a single, unified system, and
• It avoids the high cost of non-compliance which could, in the case of the nation’s food supply, include unintentional illnesses or worse.

You have too much to do to stress over your compliance activities. With SharePoint 16, you have the tools the ensure that your company is always in compliance, and can always prove it, too.