Office 365 Training Series: Understanding Compliance and Security In Office 365

Security is a concern for businesses that are moving from generic platforms to Office 365. Since this is a big change, it is important that managers know of the challenges that they will have to face once they move their data to the cloud. Every year, tech giants spend billions of dollars in security and compliance, research, as well as development. In order to protect their data, they try new features that are compatible with Office 365. After the Facebook leak, it has become important for tech giants to protect their data. In order to understand Office 365, let’s have a look at its security and compliance.

Learning About Office 365 Security and Compliance

One of the reasons why people prefer Office 365 is that it has a centralized portal, which makes it easy for admins to keep track of security and compliance issues. The portal allows Microsoft to work on its policies that are related to Office 365. Office 365 is extremely flexible and allows admins to make adjustments just the way they want.

IT admins are advised by Office 365 adopters to have a data governance plan in place. It is important to have all the policies that are needed to meet business requirements before you migrate your data. IT professionals are generally worried about emails because of the sensitive data it has. There is a need to expand the scope of compliance other than just the traditional workload. Since Office 365 is flexible, IT professionals can now work with different workloads and give alerts to admins if someone signs in with an unknown and unauthorized email address.

In addition to these features, Microsoft announced in 2017 that it will include the ability to protect and monitor compliance to external data that can be stored in Office 365. If you follow tech news, you would know that intelligence services are frequently used by Microsoft. It uses artificial intelligence and allows admins to search and track any deviant activity. Some of its services that use artificial intelligence include Advanced eDiscovery, automatic data classification, Advanced Threat Protection, and Advanced Security Management.

How Security Needs Are Managed

Office 365 has a centralized portal that takes care of all security and compliance needs for workloads. It is important you know that Office 365 doesn’t have every security and compliance feature. You need to find out the features that you need and if they need a license. Some of the security and compliance features like Azure Active Directory and threat analytics will cost you more money because they are considered as add-ons. Some of the most famous security features include customer control as well as built-in features.

Monitoring Security of Office 365

Security within Office 365 can be managed with the help of:

• Giving rights of access to the users
• Through security settings
• Through user permissions
• With the help of security policies
• With the help of security reports on Office 365 apps
• With the help of security updates

Things To Know About Office 365

Assessing Its Weakness

It can be determined in the following ways:

• By assessing security and comparing it with the set baseline.
• By knowing how you can fix detected problems.
• By knowing how you can prevent security breach and what you will do in case one happens.
• By learning about how your security score can be improved.

Other Office 365 Problems You Should Know About

Here are some of the other Office 365 issues that you should know about:

There are Some Performance Problems

Microsoft guarantees uptime, but there have been reported incidents when people were unable to access their Skype and Outlook. This is the reason why it is important for companies to have a backup plan incase Office 365 faces downtime.

There are Ownership Limits

Office 365 belongs to Microsoft, so it is only available for authorized Microsoft experts. If you have any issues, you will have to contact their support team, and until they respond, you won’t be able to do anything about the issue. This is one of the key reasons why companies opt for hybrid deployments. To improve your experience, you should get your team enrolled in Office 365 courses.

There are Customization Challenges

Office 365 doesn’t have a lot of options when it comes to customization. Some of the updates introduced by Microsoft can also affect the customization, which affects large organizations.

There are Adoption Issues

Adoption can be a big issue for companies that move to Office 365 from on-premise solution. In order to overcome adoption issues, IT experts may need to train employees so that they can learn about the new tools and features.

Today, there is an increased demand for Office 365 because of the security and features it provides. If you have any questions about security and compliance, it is highly recommended that you enroll yourself in an Office 365 course, so that you can learn all the important basics.