Microsoft Office 365 - Enterprise Grade Security for Your Data

These days everyone is concerned about data security, and with good cause. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has been a leading player in security, along with reliability and user productivity. When they took the Office productivity suite to the cloud with Office 365, they also took a giant leap forward in terms of being able to secure your most important and confidential information.

But let’s make one thing perfectly clear: your data is yours and it belongs to you alone. Office 365 gives you extensive control over privacy and visibility in terms of who has access. You manage these controls and you can customize them to fit the needs of your company. In the unlikely event that you choose to leave Office 365, you take you data with you and it is completely removed from the Microsoft cloud. Let’s look at some other features:

Secure Identity Controls

Office 365 allows you to manage users through access control, identity management and password authentication, which fully supports 3^rd party identity providers. Through the use of multi-factor authentication, you can choose the level of ID control that works best for your organization:

• Enabling and enforcing end-user multi-factor authentication
• Using a mobile app (one-time password) as your 2^nd authentication
• Using a telephone call as the 2^nd auth factor
• Using an SMS message as the 2^nd factor
• Separate passwords for non-browser baser software, such as Skype for Business

In other words, Office 365 gives you options from fairly basic to extremely advanced and you are free to choose what works best for you.

Infrastructure Security

Microsoft spans the globe and their sheer size allows the use of techniques and strategies for defense against attacks on their network that few service providers can offer…certainly far above the ability of the typical small to mid-sized business.

Threat Management

Microsoft uses threat management controls that identify intent, determine capability of achieving that intent, and the likelihood of that threat successfully exploiting a vulnerability. This protection includes email spam, malware, viruses, and protection of Exchange.

Mobility

Your people are on the move. They work from home, in airports, hotels, clients’ offices…in town and around the world, and they take their devices, both self-owned and company provided, wherever they go. Whether they use Apple, Android or Windows platforms, the Office 365 mobile device management system identifies, monitors and protects your company’s sensitive information.

Incident Response

Stuff happens. Microsoft has a highly-advanced incident response program that includes multiple dedicated teams to prevent security incidents from happening, but when they do occur, they are immediately detected and immediately responded to.

Multi-Tenant Security

This is a fancy way of saying that multiple clients share the same infrastructure, which sometimes leads to a concern about keeping one client’s date secure from another client. Microsoft works under the assumption that any single client may have bad intentions and has created an enterprise level of security that insures privacy, confidentiality and integrity of files. It would be next to impossible for any single company to achieve this level of security on their own. By the way, it is this multi-tenant structure that enable small companies (although large companies do this as well) to have enterprise level infrastructure at affordable costs.

Physical Security

All Office 365 clients’ data is stored in data centers located around the world, using multi-layer “defense-in-depth” security protection. These centers are constructed to withstand natural disasters, or unauthorized access and have extensive power and internet backup systems. Geo-redundancy (co-locating in multiple centers) with automatic failover provides still further protection.

So as you can see, Microsoft Office 365 provides extensive security controls. We hope this information will give you a strong level of comfort, but if you have any questions, please give us a call.

DynaSis has been a Microsoft Partner since 1993 and specializes in Office 365 installation. You can find us online at 678.373.3716 or www.DynaSis.com.