Use Office 365 with Confidence Thanks to Advanced Security Management

Using cloud-based applications comes with some additional risk–some of it unique. Organizations need to have tools in place to protect data stored in the cloud, and to guard against employees installing or accessing unsanctioned Web apps and services. Microsoft developed Office 365 Advanced Security Management to provide stronger security and help businesses operate with confidence.

Many organizations have embraced Office 365—with all of the perks and benefits it includes. The cloud-based components of Office 365 introduce some unique security concerns as well, though, so Microsoft has developed Office 365 Advanced Security Management to address those concerns and enable businesses to use Office 365 with more confidence.

A blog post from Microsoft announcing the new security solution outlines the components of Office 365 Advanced Security Management:

· Threat detection—Helps you identify high-risk and abnormal usage, and security incidents.

· Enhanced control—Shapes your Office 365 environment leveraging granular controls and security policies.

· Discovery and insights—Get enhanced visibility into your Office 365 usage and shadow IT without installing an end point agent.

Threat Detection involves anomaly detection that analyzes user behavior to detect suspicious activity. The blog post explains, “Anomaly detection works by scanning user activities and evaluating their risk against over 70 different indicators, including sign-in failures, administrator activity and inactive accounts. For example, you can be alerted to impossible travel scenarios, such as if a user signs in to the service to check their mail from New York and then two minutes later is downloading a document from SharePoint Online in Tokyo.”

The Enhanced Control feature comes with pre-defined templates, but also allows IT to modify or create new policies that are unique to your environment. A variety of filters and triggers can be configured, and alerts can be created to notify IT immediately via email or text message when a violation occurs.

I spoke about the launch of Office 365 Advanced Security Management with Ron Markezich, corporate VP for Office 365 Commercial Marketing. Markezich explained that Microsoft recognized the need to increase security for cloud-based applications and data. He also clarified that Microsoft is not focused solely on Microsoft applications—but also how Microsoft can help customers secure all applications and data across the entire environment.

Check out the full story at Forbes: Microsoft Unveils Office 365 Advanced Security Management.