Another month, another set of Office 365 updates have been rolled out by the team. For the month of May 2016, the Office 365 team has chosen to focus its efforts on security and compliance. Office 365 customers and users should find some comfort in knowing that the Office team, while introducing new features monthly, has also been gaining accreditation from around the world for “upholding the highest standards in cloud security.”
For the month of May, the Office team is highlighting the past few weeks of updates and features that brought enhanced security and compliance to the platform that include:
- Email Safety Tips in Office 365—Today’s spam and malware attacks are sometimes so well-crafted they may look like legitimate emails to your users. Putting messages into the Junk Email folder isn’t enough. Over the coming weeks, we are rolling out Safety Tips in Exchange Online Protection, which provides a warning to the user in an email that is marked suspicious or a reassurance when a message is safe.
- New regions and capabilities are available for Office 365 Import Service—The Office 365 Import Service is now generally available and has expanded to new regions with additional capabilities that make it even easier to import data into Office 365.
- Automate time-consuming eDiscovery search tasks—Quickly creating and reporting discovery searches is often an important step in eDiscovery and investigations when you’re trying to learn about the underlying data and the richness and quality of your searches. To help you do this, the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center offers a set of Windows PowerShell cmdlets to automate time-consuming Content Search tasks.
- Yammer attains advanced Office 365 compliance—Recently, we announced that Yammer has achieved a series of industry-leading security and compliance standards, including ISO 27001 and SSAE 16. These independent compliance reports are now available to customers at the Office 365 Service Trust Portal, so customers can easily perform their own regulatory risk assessments. To learn more about industry standards and regulations that Office 365 supports, view the Office 365 Compliance Framework.
- How Microsoft monitors and protects sensitive data in Office 365—Microsoft IT recently released a case study on how it leverages the data loss prevention solution in Office 365 to help reduce the risk of sharing sensitive data while still promoting collaboration.
Internationally speaking, Office 365 has also included its announcement of Office 365 being accredited for Cloud Security Gold Mark in Japan:
The Cloud Security Mark (CS Mark) is the first security standard for cloud service providers (CSPs) in Japan and is based on ISO/IEC 27017, the international code of practice for information security controls. The CS Mark helps customers verify operational transparency and visibility into Office 365’s information security controls and address common concerns around security and confidentiality of data. The CS Mark is accredited by the Japan Information Security Audit Association (JASA).
Office 365 also managed to offer a combined Office 365 and Azure hyper-scale cloud service that Spain has received Spain’s National Security Framework.
The framework establishes core policies and mandatory requirements that government agencies must meet, as well as require, for its service providers. It defines a set of specific security controls for different classifications of security—availability, authenticity, integrity, confidentiality, and traceability.”
With it being the early days of May, the Office team may also be set to announce further productivity features to the platform in the coming days. For now, though, cloud security and accreditations make up the bulk of the team’s releases for the month.
Further reading: Azure, compliance, Microsoft, Office 365, Security, Yammer
