Enterprise Security and Compliance from Office 365

The IT roll is now more demanding than ever, with more devices to enable productivity and secure from complex threats that may affect organizations with their enterprise security.

Over the last year, Microsoft has introduced several new security and compliance capabilities to Office 365. These security and compliance capabilities are Customer Lockbox, Threat Protection and Advanced eDiscovery, which integrates Equivio.

Earlier this year Microsoft acquired Equivio, an eDiscovery software company that focuses on document analytics.

What is eDiscovery?

Electronic or eDiscovery refers to litigation or government investigations that deal with the exchange of information in electronic formats, which is often referred to as electronically stored information (ESI).

Office 365 integrates these security and compliance capabilities to expand upon their market-leading, built-in security capabilities. Microsoft announced today that Customer Lockbox and Advanced eDiscovery will be available to customers to purchase starting December 1^st 2015.

Compliance and security

Microsoft is claiming they are taking an intelligent-oriented approach to enhancing security, privacy and transparency for customers around their data in Office 365. Hackers are getting more and more sophisticated with their continuous attacks. The amount of data that organizations are managing is increasing exponentially and the devices that people are using to access the information are growing as well. Office 365 security capabilities use intelligent systems that apply machine learning and data analytics can help you stay one step ahead of hackers trying to access your organizations data.

Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protection extends the built-in security capabilities of Office 365, by protecting against unknown malware and viruses. Advanced Threat Protection does this by applying behavioral analysis that identifies attachments and links in email that have a higher probability of being hacked.

Microsoft says that running their global commercial cloud email service at scale, and the insights Advanced Threat Protection surfaces regarding hacks and attacks, help them improve the built-in security capabilities that are delivered to all Office 365 commercial customers.

Not only do organizations have to worry about external attacks on their systems, they also have to address the challenges of storing and managing an increasingly vast amount of data. Organizations do this to stay responsive to litigation, investigation or regulatory eDiscovery requests.

Advanced eDiscovery in Office 365 integrates Equivio machine learning, predictive coding and text analytics capabilities. That helps to reduce the costs and challenges that come with sorting through large amounts of data for eDiscovery purposes. With the amount of data being produced by organizations today the eDiscovery process could involve sorting through millions of emails, text messages, instant messages and documents to find a small amount of files that would be relevant to what you’re looking for. Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery reduces the volume of data by eliminating duplicate files, reconstructing email threads and identifying necessary themes and data relationships. Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery also enables users to train the system to intelligently explore and analyze large, unstructured data sets to be able to quickly and easily find out what is relevant information.

Data transparency in the cloud

From smaller non-profits to enterprise organizations alike having visibility of your data and knowing what is going on with it in the cloud is a necessity. Microsoft knows this and has launched Customer Lockbox, which offers customers the ability to have full control over access to their data in Office 365. Customer Lockbox gives Office 365 customers the top approval rights in the very rare cases when a Microsoft Engineer must request access to your service. Access control activities in the Office 365 service are logged and audited, and a Microsoft engineer can only gain access to your service with your approval.

Data protection and productivity

Microsoft has announced that starting December 1^st, Customer Lockbox and Advanced eDiscovery will be available for purchase as add-on services to all Office 365 enterprise plans. Advanced Threat Protection is currently available for purchase as an add-on.

In my opinion, Microsoft is doing a great job of staying ahead of the new security breaches, hacks and attacks that are increasing throughout the world. While still maintaining their world class productivity software.