If your company is an Office 365 user, data security may be one of the reasons you choose the platform. Beyond the Secure Score tool, Microsoft has multiple security features built in and they keep on adding to them.
Because the platform is the most used cloud solution in the world, hackers have been increasingly targeting Office 365 users for a number of nefarious reasons, including to gain access to user files and information, and send out spam and phishing on user email accounts.
There are over 300 million fraudulent sign-in attempts on Microsoft cloud services every day.
In the face of increasing attacks, one factor that Australian businesses that use Office 365 can take some comfort in is that Microsoft continually adds more security to the platform through feature updates.
Upcoming updates planned for 2020, not only help increase data security in the platform, they also give you new ways to meet compliance needs in various industry sectors.
So, what’s coming in 2020 when it comes to new security features in Office 365? We’ll give you a run down below.
Watch for These New Security Features in Office 365
There are several new security enhancements that you’ll see very soon in Office 365 that add a variety of safeguards in programs like Microsoft Outlook, Word/Excel/PowerPoint, OneDrive, and more.
Knowing the capabilities being added, can help you prepare now to take full advantage of them when available to increase your data security posture.
New Outlook Incident Notification
A new notification being added in Outlook for Windows will help Microsoft 365 administrators stay on top of incidents affecting users. Notifications will appear in a right side panel as a new alert.
Microsoft Compliance Score General Availability
A tool to help companies monitor data protection controls and reduce compliance risk is due to be generally available in April 2020. Microsoft Compliance Score has been in public preview since November and offers built-in control mapping to scale compliance across global, industrial, and regional standards.
Updates to Office 365 ATP
If you’ve seen emails with dangerous links or file attachments slip past the advanced threat protection in Office 365 and make it into user inboxes, some help for this issue is coming.
Microsoft has taken note of cases where Office 365 ATP allowed malicious content to be delivered to end users and is working on features to fix this. The first of which is an update to their filters to ensure those malicious files and URLs are stopped regardless of other transport rules and configurations.
ATP Rescue Portal
If you’re trying to simulate a phishing attack for user awareness training, having your messages blocked by Office 365 ATP can make that difficult. For this reason, Microsoft is adding a Rescue Portal to the application that will allow admins to explicitly allow or block attachments and URLs in your Office 365 tenant.
Recommended Profiles in Exchange Online Protection and ATP
If you’re a security administrator, it can be difficult to know which settings to put in place for various users. Microsoft is making this easier by giving administrators the ability to use their two recommended security level profiles, Standard and Strict, and apply them to a defined set of users.
Automated Incident Response for Compromised Accounts
This feature helps address the growing threat to Office 365 user accounts coming from all directions, especially phishing scammers. A new playbook for automated investigation and remediation will detect compromised users by looking for things like abnormal email sending patterns, and automatically put risk mitigation tactics into play to contain the threat.
Automatic Classification and Labeling in OneDrive and SharePoint
Users don’t always label sensitive documents correctly, which can leave them at risk of being mishandled. Microsoft is adding automatic labeling and classification of documents based upon content inspection for data stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint to improve information protection.
Keep Email Notifications Confidential
When an email notification pops up on your phone, it can reveal more than you like if it’s a sensitive message. Microsoft just launched support in Outlook for Android for hiding email content in notifications based on an organisation’s data protection policies. This feature is also currently being rolled out in Outlook for iOS.
Safe Documents
Safe Documents is a feature that protects your users from opening malicious files. Office documents are increasingly being used to hide malware as a way to get past antivirus security. Safe Documents will automatically check untrusted Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files against Office ATP and Windows Defender Antivirus before they are allowed to be opened.
Are Your Cloud Platforms Fully Secure?
If you’re not familiar with all the security settings and policies of the different cloud platforms you use, you could be leaving your data at risk. Let Connected Platforms help your Brisbane business ensure your data is safeguarded and users have the protection they need.
Contact us today for a free IT security consultation or to find out about other IT solutions we can help you with. Call (07) 3062 6932 or book a coffee meeting online.
