New Microsoft Cloud Trust Center for Office 365

Microsoft’s TecEd conference in North America today released a number of new features for the Office 365 platform including a revamp of their Trust Center site.  For those who do not know about the Trust Center this is a complete site that details the security, efforts and certifications Microsoft have achieved in order to make Office 365 secure and compliant.

The new Office 365 Trust Center – http://trust.office365.com/

 Details of their blog post can be found here but below is a small summary of the key points:

1. Encrypted Storage – Starting from July an upgrade from single encryption keys per disk to a unique encryption key per file.  This means for SharePoint online or OneDrive for business users each file has a separate encryption key, increasing the encryption.
2. MDM for Office Apps on mobiles – this would appear to allow IT departments to give the ability of creating, viewing and sharing policies between managed applications.  I think this is in conjunction with Windows Intune and the Enterprise Mobility suite – further details can be found here.
3. Extending DLP – bringing similar technology from the DLP (Data Loss / Leak Prevention) in email scanning into SharePoint and OneDrive for business documentation.  This will be rolled out in June to Office 365 E3 customers allowing them to prevent sharing based on document classifications and queried through the E-Discovery Suite.

Highlights of the Office365 Trust Center:

An interesting stat I have found which shows the current global uptime of Office365 is Quarterly worldwide uptime: 99.96%  and the last 4 quarters have been 99.98%, 99.97%, 99.94% and 99.97% – can you as an IT function offer this?? Check the availability here.

• Privacy – Consumer and Business infrastructure is separate, it is your data,
• Encryption – Data is encrypted at rest and in transit over the network.
• Microsoft is a data process of your data.
• Who in Microsoft has access to your data see here.
• Regionalised data centres keeps data with the region but they can move this to a different region so beware.
• Law enforcement requests – see here for details.  See below for the UK:

Additional resources:

• Top 10 questions you should ask your cloud services provider
• Top 10 security and privacy features of Office 365
• Top 10 compliance standards of Office 365
• Services covered by the Office 365 Trust Center