As organizations transition from the data center to the Public Cloud, their compliance requirements move with the documents migrated to the cloud. Not all these documents end up in the same cloud provider for various reasons, such as mergers, departmental preference, aborted migrations, and organizational transitions, to name a few. Many organizations have documents scattered across Box, DropBox, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Google Docs because of these business realities. When auditors show up at your door, how do you handle compliance and reporting across heterogenous cloud storage platforms?
The reporting tools from Box are not going to deliver the information needed for SharePoint Online. They are competing storage providers with no interest in benefitting the other with their engineering. All these online storage platforms provide an application programming interface (API) to query the files, document metadata, and access logs stored on their platform. A skilled programmer can spend hundreds of hours building reporting tools that ingest the compliance data and create dashboards for presentation. Most organizations find themselves unable to dedicate the time and resources to build that automated compliance platform. These organizations use the bespoke tools from each storage provider and cobble together the required artifacts to meet their compliance goals. The compliance reporting leads to hours of administrative work to download, normalize, and present the compliance data.