Office 365 Security: Why Most Organizations Can’t Fully Secure Microsoft 365

Organizations using Office 365 should know that fully securing the cloud might not be possible through conventional means. Despite being a world-renowned suite with endless collaboration and productivity tools, Office 365 might not be best equipped to mitigate data protection risks.

That’s because data protection and security are your organization’s responsibility, not Microsofts. Microsoft emphasizes the “shared model” of data protection, which states they’re not entirely responsible for data protection. Office 365 security, although capable of stopping threats, is not a primary feature of the suite.

Organizations must keep that in mind when trying to secure data from essential Microsoft Office apps, such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Outlook, OneDrive, etc.

This guide will cover why organizations should use third-party solutions for Office 365 total protection. With all that said, let’s begin.

What’s Microsoft’s Data Protection Responsibility?

Office 365 is a collaboration and productivity suite that provides everything organizations need to digitize their business. This includes email, cloud storage, EMS (enterprise mobility and security), the Windows 10 operating system, Microsoft Defender, and more.

In addition to the base Microsoft Office apps, like Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Excel, the suite is more than capable of transforming your business to the cloud. But Office 365 isn’t responsible for protecting data and mitigating data breaches. Although it gives you the tools, they themselves recommend going with third-party solutions for O365 total protection.

So with that said, what is Microsoft’s responsibility? Microsoft will guarantee application and service uptime across the suite. This means you can always expect their services to operate flawlessly with zero downtime.

But what about your data on these apps? While Microsoft offers numerous security features that aim to protect cloud services, information protection falls on your shoulders. Here is how you can fully secure data across Office 365.

Third-Party Solutions for Office 365 Total Protection

Microsoft understands the security flaws of the suite. After all, security is not a primary role of the suite. Therefore, Microsoft recommends integrating third-party solutions to protect your data on Microsoft’s online service. Here is how these solutions do it:

• Email Protection

Organizations use email as the primary method of internal and external communication. The Office 365 suite offers several security features that aim to prevent email risks. In addition, the suite helps your organization maintain communication compliance through Microsoft Purview.

But third-party solutions take email protection to the next level. These solutions come with anti-phishing protection features that can detect malicious links sent through email. In addition, these solutions offer world-class email encryption that further prevents risks from phishing attacks and similar email threats.

Lastly, third-party solutions come with advanced spam and malware protection. For example, if the software detects a potential threat from incoming emails, it will block and delete the email in question. This, essentially, eliminates the risk of users opening the email and clicking malicious links.

• Backups

Backups are integral components of business continuity. Without keeping backups of sensitive information, you risk losing the information for good. The Office 365 suite offers several security features to help with data retention in case of accidental deletion. But they’re not perfect. For example, deleted data in SharePoint Online stays in the recycling bin for 93 days.

If you don’t retrieve the data within 93 days, it’s gone forever. Third-party solutions increase the retention time by essentially storing the deleted data on their services. Moreover, these solutions offer full-fledged backups of data across Office 365 cloud apps.

That way, you always have a copy to revert to in case of accidental or malicious deletion. Furthermore, these solutions can back up entire Outlook mailboxes, further emphasizing the email protection capabilities these solutions come with.

• Threat Detection and Log Monitoring

Office 365 comes with an advanced audit feature that increases audit log retention and activity monitoring. Therefore, you can easily monitor all the activity on the suite; both admin and user activity.

However, the suite lacks the threat detection capabilities of modern third-party total protection solutions. These solutions employ Advanced Threat Protection features that focus on detecting threats across the many Office online services and any Office app.

With threat detection, your organization stays one step ahead of cybercriminals who look to compromise your systems.

Conclusion

It does seem like Office 365 isn’t capable of protecting your data across the cloud. That’s certainly far from true. Office 365 is one of the best collaboration and productivity suites on the market, and Microsoft does take security very seriously. Moreover, we didn’t even mention all the suite’s security features.

But with that said, we must remember that data protection and security isn’t Microsoft’s primary responsibility — it’s to provide organizations with the apps, services, and tools to fully digitize their businesses. So it’s natural to assume they would pay more attention to services such as Microsoft Information Governance instead of backup features.

The bottom line is you should use Office 365. But you must also integrate third-party total protection solutions to eliminate threats.