Saturday, May 5, 2018

Office 365 Mult-Geo goes Generally Available

Office 365 multi-geo has now gone GA.  This is a significant feature release that allows a single Office 365 tenant to span across multiple Office 365 datacenter geographies.  This allows companies and organizations to store data-at-rest, on-a-per-user-basis in a chosen geography. 

This allows organizations to support data residency guidelines they have been asked to address in the cloud.  To date, many organizations have had to address these solutions through cloud hybrid solutions and retaining locally hosted services on-premises within those countries.  It worked, but customers were stilled required to invest in on-premises solutions.

This solution has been launched for the Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business services.



Announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Get-global-data-location-controls-with-Multi-Geo-Capabilities-in/ba-p/182710

Announcement - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/04/16/preparing-for-a-new-era-in-privacy-regulation-with-the-microsoft-cloud/

Product Home Page - https://products.office.com/en-us/business/multi-geo-capabilities

OneDrive Multi-geo Page - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/multi-geo-capabilities-in-onedrive-and-sharepoint-online-in-office-365

Exchange Online Multi-geo Page - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/multi-geo-capabilities-in-exchange-online

Office 365 Privileged Access Management

There was a Preview announcement for the Privileged Access Management feature.  This feature is super exciting to hear about and really demonstrates how mature Microsoft Office 365 is in its delivery of security services for their customers.

Privileged Access Management is a feature to help customers provide limited privileged rights to administrator functions.  Doing this provides greater control, oversight and audit trail to what customer Office 365 administrators can do.

Since the beginning, Microsoft has had a solution called the Lockbox.  This is a Just-in-time (JIT) access solution that manages all Microsoft administrator access to Office 365 itself.  Microsoft has standing privileges to Office 365 and all our access to the environment is controlled through this.  We even created a solution called Customer Lockbox, which allows customers to approve Microsoft to manage aspects of the Office 365 environment if access to their customer data was needed as part of a support operation.

Apparently, customers liked the Lockbox concept so much, they wanted a similar capability to manage their Office 365 Admin users.  This is the new Privileged Access Management solutions.  Customers have the ability to create policies where Office 365 Administrators can make requests to perform specific actions.  This will initiate workflow approvals to allow them to perform those actions for a specified period of time.  All of this auditable.  Wow.  This is huge.

Customers always have risks of insider threats, and this can help control that access.

Note this solution does required the Advanced Compliance Office 365 E5 SKU.

Reference - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Announcing-preview-of-privileged-access-management-in-Office-365/ba-p/183743


SharePoint Online Storage Increase!

Major announcement was made in late April that SharePoint Online storage allocation is increasing significantly.

Previously SharePoint Online storage was 1 TB plus .5 GB per user license purchased.

Now SharePoint Online storage is 1 TB plus 10 GB per user license purchased.

So, if you have 100,000 users in your organization, you have 1001 TBs of storage.  Wow!

This is usage and it being driven by the usage and consumption of file storage in SharePoint Online.

Reference - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Increase-in-SharePoint-Online-storage-allocation/ba-p/187617