Protiviti, the IT business of HR consulting heavyweight Robert Half, has nabbed a partner award from Microsoft in the compliance and privacy category.

The Compliance & Privacy Trailblazer award was issued to the company at a recent industry event in San Francisco. The winner was selected by representatives from Microsoft and an association that represents the IT behemoth’s consulting partners.

“We’re honored to be recognized by Microsoft as a proven premier security and compliance service provider helping organizations become more effective and efficient while managing regulatory requirements with leading Microsoft technologies,” commented Tom Andreesen, the Protiviti exec in charge of the company’s alliance with Microsoft.

Protiviti nabbed the award for its work on helping companies make sure their IT systems comply with the various privacy regulations that apply to their business.

Some privacy rules require that a company only gather data on its users if they give it permission to do so. Making sure all the users whose data a company stores gave it the greenlight is difficult to carry out consistently.

That’s where Protiviti enters the picture. The consultancy can work with companies to find gaps in their compliance and privacy workflows, as well as develop a plan for fixing them.

Protiviti also works on related projects for clients. It can optimize a company’s existing privacy program to make it more consistent, as well as take  over some of the more complicated tasks involved in managing users’ data.

Protiviti often carries out such projects using Microsoft software, which is why it was given the Compliance & Privacy Trailblazer award by the IT giant.

Microsoft offers multiple software solutions that companies can use to ensure they comply with privacy rules. Even its Microsoft 365 app suite has a built-in privacy module that detects if a company’s Word documents contain items subject to privacy regulations.

Protiviti says that it nabbed the award because it “demonstrated excellence across security, identity, management, compliance and privacy during the past 12 months.” That can mean a number of things.

It’s possible Protiviti convinced a particularly impressive number of consulting clients to adopt Microsoft’s privacy and compliance products, generating significant revenue for the IT giant. Another possibility is that the consultancy simply carried out its work in this arena particularly efficiently over the past year. 

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