Microsoft’s drum march towards continuing its dominant position in the enterprise has been recently bolstered by its addition of Office 365 Service Assurance.
The Office team has announced today, August 8, 2016, that Office 365 customers can be assured that the software suite now meets the various security, privacy and compliance requirements imposed by commercial businesses and as it now houses a Service Assurance Dashboard.
With the addition of the Office 365 Service Assurance Dashboard, customers can stay up to date about
- Details on how Office 365 implements security, privacy and compliance controls including details of how third-party independent auditors perform audits to test these controls.
- Third-party independent audit reports including: SSAE 16 / SOC 1, SOC 2 / AT 101, ISO 27001 and ISO 27018.
- Deep insights into how we implement encryption, incident management, tenant isolation and data resiliency.
- Information on how you can leverage Office 365 security controls and configurations to protect your data.
The Service Assurance Dashboard is yet another tool to keep the transparency between Microsoft and its customers readily available while also providing users a more robust set of tools for insights, test status, Audit Controls and more.
In this open and transparent model, we don’t just tell you “what” controls we have implemented, but also give you insights into “how” Microsoft implements and tests these controls. The Compliance Reports and Trust Documents provide you independent audit reports, deep-dive white papers and FAQs that are relevant to your geography and industry. Service Assurance helps you to stay secure and compliant with an “end-to-end” view of controls implemented by you as well as by Microsoft. For controls owned by you, it provides actionable implementation plans for relevant features that help you to implement these controls and manage your risks.”
By adding the Service Assurance Dashboard, Microsoft claims it has helped save businesses significant time in evaluating Office 365’s security, privacy, and compliance offerings, in turn, adding tens of thousands of corporate users to Office 365.
Perhaps, most obviously, the Service Assurance Dashboard is being made only available to Office 365 tenants or prospective customers who hold an Office 365 E3 or E5 trial subscription. Casual users of Office 365 will need to lean over their corporate friend’s shoulder to read the services compliance reports if they are interested, unfortunately.
Head over to the Office 365 for Business site or the Office Blogs for more information on the Service Assurance and Office 365 compliance.
