Reporting and managing IT security anomalies

There are plenty of internal processes in organizations where all employees should be given a method to report observations or issues that they encounter. These reports in turn should have a structured & secure mechanism for how the data is stored, processed, reviewed and finally reported back to the original employee.

One example of such a process that Team Forward Forever recently developed a low-code solution for is the reporting and management of IT security anomalies (“tietoturvapoikkeama” in Finnish). The back end of this solution is using a Dataverse for Teams environment, which means all Microsoft 365 licensed users can leverage it without requiring premium Power Apps licenses.

Having the database and admin user interface inside Microsoft Teams isn’t the only way in which this solution integrates with the daily collaboration tools of the customer organization. When an employee reports a new anomaly via Microsoft Forms, the messaging between the admin team members responsible for reviewing the report is done via automatically provisioned Teams chats. The Flow bot sends the details as Adaptive Cards and allows the team members to perform actions directly on the chat message, without having to open the full Power Apps UI.

Not only does this solution facilitate the processing of IT security anomalies within the context of Microsoft Teams, it also creates a detailed log of all actions that are taken. The description and decisions on the anomaly can also be archived as a PDF document generated based on the information logged into Dataverse for Teams and stored in a SharePoint document library for archival purposes.

You can view more details about this particular app in our App Gallery. The functionality and requirements could easily be adapted to other issue reporting processes as well. The beauty of such a low-code solution built on top of Power Platform is that it allows the data structures, automation steps and Microsoft Cloud integration points to be modified for each individual organization. What’s even better, the organization can take ownership of their digital tools and further evolve these apps through their own citizen developer teams. No custom code is required for digitally transforming internal processes like these.

If you want to read more about the scenarios for leveraging Dataverse for Teams, check out the recent presentation from Jukka Niiranen at the Teams Nation 2022 community conference: “Dataverse meets Teams: low-code app opportunities for everyone”.