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Audit Vault Step by Step Implementation Guide

Who is this guide for:

This guide acts as a step-by-step implementation how-to guide for a new Company Administrator that wants to setup Audit Vault for M365. You may be a CIO or IT Director, IT Administrator, Audit Team Member, Legal Team Member, Records Leader, or Information Management Leader.

Why enable:

You wish to enable Audit Vault for M365 for your organization to secure and preserve all of your organization’s Microsoft 365 (Office 365) audit log entries and audit history. Preserve and maintain the historical legal chain of custody of your vital documents in SharePoint including your full Microsoft 365 audit history for as long as you require, and regardless of your Microsoft User license types - helping you save you on yearly licensing / subscription costs.

Prerequisites:

Below is a general list of pre-requisites you want to have ready in order to get started. This will help you move smoothly through the actual implementation.

  • A Microsoft 365 (M365) Tenant
  • Your corresponding Microsoft 365 Account details (username and password)
  • An accurate estimate of how many Microsoft 365 Users exist in your organization (this is used for us to accurately size our solution for your organization)
  • If your account is not the Microsoft 365 Global Administrator for your organization – please have your Microsoft 365 Global Administrator ready to approve our App Read Access
  • · Have around 30 minutes to read this guide and sign-up online.

Let’s get started!

Proceed to the main page for Audit Vault for M365 – and choose to Sign Up.

Create Your Audit Vault for M365 Account in less than 5 minutes!

  1. Provide your Company Details:
    • This step involves us collecting details about your organization such as the name of your company, and the # users in your Microsoft 365 Tenant or organization. Please note the user count you specify is important in order to size our solution for your organization (if your count is incorrect or not accurate, we reserve the right to update your subscription to the correct level for your organization’s user count).
    • We also collect your contact information in case we need to contact you with regards to your setup or configuration.
    • Our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are provided for you to review and consent to on behalf of your organization.
    • Your Microsoft 365 Account:
      • If you are already signed into Microsoft 365 – the account you are signed-in as will be automatically detected and displayed in the header of the App.
      • If you are not signed into Microsoft – you will see a button to sign in with your existing Microsoft Account. Please proceed to sign-in with the account tied to the Organization you want to manage (sign-in using your normal Microsoft 365 credentials).
      • NOTE: The account you sign-in as must be associated to the Microsoft Tenant or Organization you are wanting to protect with Audit Vault for M365 - hence it is important you are signed-in under the correct Microsoft account. The account specified will be assigned as the initial Company Admin role for this App (you can change this later).
      • On first login you will be prompted for granting our App permissions to access information about your Microsoft 365 account. Please grant our App access to your account in order to proceed, this is required in order for us to associate your account to our App.
    • Proceed to next step by clicking “Next”.
  2. Provide your Billing Information
    • This step is required to capture your billing information, your free trial period is for 14 days after which payment will be due.
    • Specify your billing information such as address, city, country, zip/postal code.
    • You may enter and apply any promotional codes if you have one.
    • Proceed to next step by clicking “Next”.
  3. Review and Complete Your Order
    • This step requires you to specify your credit card information for this account.
    • From this step you can review your chosen subscription plan, terms and the customer subscription agreement.
    • When ready you can proceed to next step by clicking “Start 14 Day Trial”.

At this point your organization in Audit Vault for M365 will be created. The following steps will now allow you to configure your Tenant and setup initial Audit Log preservation settings.

Configure Your Tenant

  1. Add Your M365 Tenant
    • This step allows you to set up and configure your M365 Tenant in Audit Vault for M365.
    • You should see a section on your screen called “Audit Vault for M365 - Complete Your Setup to Continue”.
    • Click on the option “Add a New Tenant”.
    • From this screen you will be able to specify your specific Tenant settings to control what audit sources are being preserved and frequency of processing.
      • Choose the Tenant name from your existing list of domains from Microsoft 365.
      • Choose your corresponding Microsoft endpoint (if you are unsure of which endpoint you reside on, please talk to your IT or M365 Administrator, note that most commercial private organizations would generally be on the Enterprise endpoint).
        • Options are: Enterprise, GccGovernment, GccHighGovernment, or DodGovernment
    • Email notifications setting if enabled will send emails to the Company Administrator if there are any issues with the service.
    • The SharePoint Audit History Page settings will be covered in the additional setup guides section below. For now, leave the default settings in place.
    • For Audit Source Workloads you may enable or disable the workloads you wish to preserve in Audit Vault for M365 along with the frequency for audit vault processing.
      • We recommend you leave all Workloads enabled, and accept the default frequency of processing at every 60 minutes. You may update the processing frequency according to your needs (less or more frequent).
    • Click “Create Tenant”.
  2. Grant this App access to your M365 Tenant
    • At this point your M365 Tenant has been specified for use with Audit Vault for M365. We now need to grant the App read-access to your M365 Tenant’s audit log information. This is required for our App to protect, preserve and shield your important audit log history.
    • Please have one of your Microsoft 365 Global Administrators ready to grant access to this App.
      • If you aren’t your organization’s Microsoft 365 Global Administrator, in our experience it’s easiest to schedule a screenshare on Teams and have them sign-in and approve the request. It literally takes 1 minute.
  3. Click on the option “Grant Consent”
    • This will open up the Microsoft 365 sign-in page asking for a M365 Global Administrator to sign-in.
    • Have your M365 Global Administrator sign-in.
    • Once signed-in, you will be presented with Microsoft’s “Permission Requested” screen.
      • It will show the “ECM Insights: Audit Vault for M365” application and the read-access it is requesting to be granted access for in your Tenant.
      • Click “Accept” will grant the App read-access to your M365 Tenant’s audit log information.
  4. Validate and Run First Audit Vault Synchronization
    • At this point, your Tenant has been added to Audit Vault for M365, and the App now has access to your audit log information in Microsoft 365. We now need to validate that your Tenant is setup correctly with audit logging enabled and API access in place for your tenant.
    • A screen will be displayed indicated how long you have to wait until we have completed validation of your Tenant.
      • Once the validation has completed it will be displayed on screen.
      • This generally can be up to 10 minutes in order for all the Microsoft permissions to propagate from the previous step above.
    • Once your Tenant has been automatically validated
      • If there were any errors, please follow the instructions provided on screen or contact our Support Team.
      • If there were no issues and validation was successful:
        • The “Run First Audit Synch” button will automatically be enabled.
        • Click the option “Run first Audit Synch”.
          • This will automatically Vault your last 7 days of audit log history and enable your go-forward audit log protection. Please be patient, this operation may take a few minutes to complete.
          • Once completed you should see a message indicating “Setup Complete.”.

Congratulations! Audit Vault for M365 is now preserving, shielding and surfacing your important audit history information. This means any new audit logs generated from Microsoft 365 (ex. From SharePoint, Entra ID, and Exchange) will be automatically securely vaulted and insights made available from the Reports section of the Application.

Your free trial will be for 14 days, after your “trial” period has been completed your account will be automatically converted to “active” and payment will be processed according to your selected plan and billing information provided. Reach out to the Audit Vault for M365 Support Team if you have any questions.

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Additional Setup Guides

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