Litigation is costly, time consuming and a headache — and chances are your company is involved in it in some way. Compliance is the topic that causes many IT leaders to lose sleep, as they wonder whether they will survive a call from legal.

Microsoft is listening.

You would be forgiven if you missed some of the significant compliance news Microsoft announced last week in the midst of the Ignite conference hullabaloo, but the combined announcements show the company’s commitment to addressing lingering concerns with putting data in the cloud.

I’ve been tracking what Microsoft is trying to do with compliance, e-Discovery and other legal and compliance concerns for some time now. The lightspeed push to the cloud over the last five years has left a gaping hole in what organizations can do to get governance of their data under control.