During TechEd North America 2014, Microsoft announced new service-level capabilities and consumer controls for Office 365. These new features enable businesses to customize the Office 365 environment based on the specific needs of their organization
“With Office 365, we think about security, compliance, and privacy as having two equally important dimensions: service-level capabilities that include technical features, operational procedures, and policies that are enabled by default for customers using the service; and customer controls that include features that enable businesses to customize the Office 365 environment based on the specific needs of their organization,” Microsoft stated in an official blog post.
There is no denying that security is of utmost concern. Microsoft has already enabled user-level encryption features like S/MIME, Office 365 Messaging encryption, and data loss prevention (DLP) fingerprinting to Office 365 over the past few months. Beginning in June, Microsoft will deploy advanced encryption technology to Office 365 business customers.
“The technology moves beyond a single encryption key per disk to deliver a unique encryption key per file. With advanced encryption technology, every file stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business is encrypted with its own key, and subsequent updates to a file are encrypted with their own unique key as well. This makes OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online highly secure content storage for your data,” Microsoft explained.
Microsoft is also offering better mobile device management for Office 365. With Office and OWA for mobile devices, users soon will be able to access corporate data from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive for Business, and OWA mobile in a protected manner based on IT policy defined through Windows Intune.
Existing data loss prevention capability (already available in Exchange) will be expanded to include documents store in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business (Office 365 Enterprise E3 customers). This will begin in June as well.
Microsoft is also re-launching the Office 365 Trust Center portal, complete with engaging and dynamic content like videos and deeper content such as whitepapers and blogs.
“Our work here is not done. We will continue to add security, privacy, and compliance capabilities to Office 365, while we continue to be transparent about what we do and how we do it through the Office 365 Trust Center,” Microsoft added.
