Executive Focus: Privacy in a Changing World

• Many new regulations protecting individuals’ privacy and personal data should be a paramount concern for IT, as penalties for noncompliance can be severe.
• Across Microsoft cloud services, a number of features and capabilities are designed to help administrators.
• The maturity and ease of use of these features varies significantly, and a new initiative announced by Brad Smith seeks to improve and standardize support.

As cloud services have become ubiquitous over the past two decades, the ability to easily access, use, and/or transmit individuals’ personal data—in violation of their wishes and/or of national or regional laws—is all too easy. New regulations, starting with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), used as the basis for a range of regulations in many countries, seek to control how user data is handled and give individuals control over their data. Microsoft has implemented new features and capabilities in its hosted services, such as Office 365 and