Microsoft Boosts Office 365 Security And Data Compliance

Microsoft has announced several updates that boost security and compliance in Office 365, including the launch of threat intelligence and advanced data governance capabilities.

Office 365 Threat Intelligence is designed to help customers stay ahead of today’s ever-evolving threat landscape and is accompanied by a new reporting interface to improve the customer experience for Advanced Threat Protection (ATP).

Office 365 Advanced Data Governance, on the other hand, provides customers with new compliance capabilities, including a policy management interface for Data Loss Protection (DLP).

Threat Intelligence

“Staying ahead of threats has never been more important”, the Office 365 team says in a blog post, citing a Ponemon Institute study which suggests the average cost of a data breach is now $4 million (£3.2m) due to costs incurred for things like litigation, reputation damage and lost sales.

To stay on top of any new threats, Office 365 Threat Intelligence provides tools for the real-time analysis of threat prevalence and severity, customisable threat alert notifications, remediation capabilities for suspicious content and integration with SIEM solutions.

Microsoft says: “To provide actionable insights on global attack trends, Threat Intelligence leverages the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, which analyses billions of data points from Microsoft global data centres, Office clients, email, user authentications, signals from our Windows and Azure ecosystems and other incidents that impact the Office 365 ecosystem.

“It provides information about malware families, both inside and outside your organisation, including breach information with details down to the actual lines of code that are used for certain types of malware.”

Threat Intelligence also integrates with other Office 365 security features to provide analysis on the top targeted users, malware frequency and security recommendations specifically related to your business.

Data Governance

As businesses continue to collect more and more data, the effective governance of this information has quickly become a key issue.

“As the amount of electronic data grows exponentially, many organisations are exposing themselves to risk by retaining unnecessary data,” Microsoft says. “For example, many organisations continue to retain the personal information of former employees who left the company long ago. If this data were compromised in a breach, the company could be liable for costly remediation, such as lifetime credit monitoring for these former employees.

“Office 365 Advanced Data Governance applies machine learning to help customers find and retain important data while eliminating trivial, redundant and obsolete data that could cause risk if compromised.”

The service features proactive policy recommendations and automatic data classifications that allow you take actions on data throughout its lifecycle, system default alerts to identify data governance risks and the ability to apply compliance controls to on-premises data by filtering and migrating that data to Office 365.

Additional enhancements such as event based retention and manual disposition are expected to arrive “in the coming months”.

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