Today, having a strong data governance program is critical for many reasons: understanding and minimizing risk to sensitive data, maintaining security and trust, avoiding compliance fines, and empowering knowledge workers to be more effective at their jobs. The trouble is, if you don’t manage scope properly, and instead try to eat the proverbial data governance elephant all in one bite, you are setting yourself up for trouble.

The latest survey data on electronic trial master file (eTMF) usage is from 2018 and puts adoption at 75%. It is no mystery why eTMFs are so popular, they make it easier to track progress, provide more control over a “single source of truth”, and enable better/faster data sharing options than a paper-based process. Digitization is listed as one of the top investments by biotech companies after the pandemic interrupted most in-person study activities.

By the end of 2020, Microsoft 365 was used by more than one million companies worldwide. And for good reason. With the move to remote work, applications like Word and Excel, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint, provided businesses with a familiar, easy to access, and easy to use productivity suite – all available in the cloud.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed more employees to work from home than ever before. While this shift has many advantages—including reduced office space costs and more geographic flexibility—it also leads workers to access data from a variety of entry points.

Microsoft 365, as a service, contains many features that focus on security. Each service uses Azure Active Directory for authentication and authorization to access either the app itself or the content that resides within it. Organization-specific security controls and procedures should augment all out-of-the-box configurations.