Microsoft has announced the commercial release of two new products for its Office 365 enterprise suite, with these being called Advanced Data Governance and Threat Intelligence respectively.
Many of those who keep a close eye on what the software giant is doing when it comes to Office 365 will be aware that both of these security solutions hit the preview point towards the beginning of the year. However, they have now reached the stage of general release, which essentially means that Microsoft has conducted thorough testing, received the necessary feedback and now considers them suitable for production environment usage.
The company is making the products available for purchase with the E5 Office 365 Enterprise plan or via the E5 Secure Productive Enterprise licensing. However, in its announcement of the releases, Microsoft also indicated that there is what has been called an Advanced Compliance plan for Office 365, through which Advanced Data Governance can be purchased. This particular plan also offers the user access to the solutions Customer Lockbox and Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery.
When it comes to the two new security offerings, threat Intelligence has been designed to provide those using it with security threat information, pulled together using multiple source data.
The Intelligent Security Graph tech from Microsoft is what harvests this data and, in the statement it provided to confirm the releases, Microsoft added that all of the information it supplies is based upon: “…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.”
Threat Intelligence will provide enterprise IT departments with the tools needed to carry out close to real-time analysis of potential security threats, as well as to establish custom alerts. Microsoft is also providing ‘remediation capabilities’ to deal with content that is not trusted, while the company says that the solution’s management API will be operational alongside a number of tools for event management and security information.
Advanced Data Governance has been created to assist enterprises with the process of applying policies for data deletion and retention. The solution offers the user recommendations for these policies and data classification based on user interaction, type and age of the data in question. In addition to this, it can provide enterprises with automated data governance risk alerts, with the option of customising these to the needs of a particular organisation. Microsoft is indicating that further capabilities are set to be added to this solution, and these can be expected to arrive during the next few months. The company’s statement suggested that they will be supervision, manual disposition and event-based retention features.
Here at WM Reply, we recognise how important Microsoft Office 365 is to the millions of enterprises around the world that deploy it, and that data security is equally important to them, so these new solutions are welcome. Contact us right away to get details of our secure SharePoint solutions.