Microsoft Increases Office 365 Security With Three New Tools

Microsoft’s Office 365 platform is nothing short of a huge success for the company. With tens of millions of users accessing the tools every day, the company has successfully pivoted an on-premises piece of software to a cloud-based platform of productivity tools.

At Ignite last year, Microsoft began introducing new security features into the platform that started the process of turning this service into a new security layer for the company. Today, Microsoft is announcing three new features for the platform that will further enhance Office 365.

Office 365 Threat Intelligence is now available in private preview with general availability planned for later this quarter. This service provides near real-time insight into the threats that impact a network (malware, adware, ransomware, ect) and can help isolate or deflect these malicious threats.

A new public preview of Office 365 Advanced Data Governance has been announced; this feature uses the company’s foundation of machine learning to identify and protect data that may be exposing an organization to unnecessary risk. This appears to be an interesting feature but I’ll need a bit more time to fully dig in to see how it works and its effectiveness.

Finally, there is the new Office 365 Secure Score; Tony has a great write-up about this tool that’s worth checking out for a deeper dive. This feature allows IT pros to evaluate the strength of their Office 365 configuration and model how simple changes can enhance and reduce their security vulnerabilities.

Microsoft says that they scan over 200 billion emails each month for malware and phishing which gives them a huge graph of data that allows them to more effectively prevent attacks from reaching the end user. On average, for the last six months, the company says they have blocked 200,000 exploit attempts per day.

All of these new features will enhance Office 365 but more importantly for Microsoft, will further cement its productivity tools as the premier applications in this sector. While building a word processor, presentation tool and even spreadsheets are easy to do with modern development languages, creating the security layer that Office 365 provides is another story.