How Does Office 365 Administration Work?

Office 365 is a service operated by Microsoft, but there are many tools and controls on this platform that customers can use to ensure security, compliance, and ongoing administration with granular control over the platform. Customers can identify, track, and protect their sensitive data using DLP features, and set specific rules for archiving, auditing, and eDiscovery for a variety of workloads.

Rights management

RMS gives the user the ability to encrypt information with 128-bit AES and apply policies to e-mail or documents. As a result, the content is successfully used only by authorized persons. File-level access is prevented for unauthorized users. Users and administrators can specify permissions to access documents, workbooks, and presentations. This will help prevent confidential information from being printed, sent, or copied by enforcing smart policies.

Multi-factor authentication

The definition is simple: it is a security method that requires two or more authentication methods to access the system, usually using independent categories of credentials to authenticate a user. By using a second factor, such as a password or personal identification number (PIN), in addition to the primary factor, which is identity, the security of a mobile, cloud-based multi-device environment is enhanced. This makes it easier to understand who is accessing your system.

Controls for sites, libraries and folders

These are methods and APIs, most notably the Office 365 Management Activity API, that allow companies to better see the actions being taken on content and control access. SharePoint Online, the core Office 365 service that provides collaboration functionality, has a set of privacy controls. These privacy controls allow you to view a variety of logs that collect information about user interactions with content, with which you can improve policies for ongoing monitoring, analysis, and data visualization. In addition to optimizing permission management based on what is happening with your content, you can use these signals as input, for example, for an incident and spreadsheet management system (SIEM).

S / MIME

This widely accepted standard for encryption and signature in public key email (S / MIME) enables certificate-based secure e-mail access. It provides encryption of email messages and allows the author to sign messages to protect their integrity and source.

Privacy controls

Skype for Business (Lync), another key component of the Office 365 platform for real-time communication, provides various administrative-level controls as well as user-level controls to enable or disable communication with external users and organizations. This allows you to control the visibility of your organization's health trackers inside and outside the company, while maintaining the privacy of your content and interactions.

Encrypting Office 365 Messages

Encryption technology makes it as easy to send and receive encrypted email as usual. How can you benefit from this? Encryption helps prevent confidential information and data from leaking out of your system using policies and compliance standards that you control. With Office 365 message encryption, you can avoid the cost of third-party infrastructure and the need for certificates by using the recipient's own email messages as the public key.

Role Based Access Control

This feature allows you to enable access for specific users based on assigned roles, role authorization, and permissions. It allows you to delegate administrative authority across the organization as needed. Some organizations may have SharePoint administrators or professionals who are not Exchange or communications administrators and therefore only need administrative privileges for a portion of the Office 365 environment. This feature allows you to segment administration by role.

Exchange Online protection

The Microsoft-backed email security service in Office 365 detects and removes malware, spam, and computer viruses. You can manage your company's anti-virus and anti-spam settings from the Office 365 administrative console, receiving near-real-time reports, creating policy-based filters, and tracking messages. All of these measures ensure your safety and compliance.

Identity management

It is the process of identifying users in the system and managing the access they are granted to resources within the system. It provides a variety of identity management capabilities, including cloud-based, on-premises, security token-based authentication, and federated identities (also known as single sign-on or SSO) to integrate with Office 365 identity management, depending on your organization's needs.

Mobile device management

Microsoft has developed tools to help manage access to the Office 365 environment across phones and tablets, regardless of operating system (iOS, Android, or Windows). These features will help you better manage security policies from devices that connect to your Office 365 environment, ensuring that security, compliance, and governance policies and procedures are covered by all access points in your environment.

What are Office 365 Management Best Practices?

Governance is important, but managing an Office 365 environment is less about technology and more about the methods and procedures used to administer content. Office 365 has the tools and capabilities you need to create sound governance standards and meet internal and industry governance requirements. A consistent, holistic, and hands-on management approach is essential for platforms like Office 365 that are broad in scope. By making it easier to prepare your policies when moving to the cloud, you can spend less effort moving resources and focus on process and management that was previously difficult.

As a result of these changes, there have been positive changes in the way we think about management and the choice of problems to be devoted to.

As you think through governance in your Office 365 environment, it is important to evaluate your strategic and tactical plans for implementing this approach. Consider each of the four categories listed below.

Platform. Establish the baseline platform operating rules and information technology security settings required to meet compliance requirements. Pay attention to the structure and support your organization must provide to keep the environment healthy.
Administration. The emphasis on collaboration between admin groups will make problem solving easier and leverage the collaboration capabilities inherent in the platform's nature. As in any group environment, defining roles and responsibilities is key to success. It is also necessary to clearly define the perspective so that administrators manage the environment for its future development.
Compound. One of the clearest forms of communication is through data exchange. Be as open as possible when it comes to managing the new platform. Gone are the days when management was carried out from behind the scenes. Formulate perspectives openly and give employees the opportunity to voice their opinions - the result will inevitably be truly fruitful interactions.
Implementation. Make an effort to engage, inform, and convince users of the benefits of introducing new functionality. Empowering them with some authority will encourage interest and increase personal involvement in the technology and its application in day-to-day work.

There are many excellent resources on the Internet for best practices for managing the Microsoft cloud first / mobile first strategy. Office 365 has many of the tools and features needed to maintain governance standards, but some companies prefer third-party solutions to better manage governance. Get started planning by setting goals and priorities for governance, and reach out to the Office 365 community for advice on where to start.

A platform as vast as Office 365 has many active components. Basic functionality is generally intuitive and can be easily deployed in a small company, but the level of complexity increases rapidly with an increase in the number of end users or strict definition of security, compliance, and governance requirements.

It's important to remember that your data needs to be protected beyond the security settings of Office 365. Even if you enable all of the security settings in Office 365, data security is largely dependent on the actions of all users. The data that moves between the employees of the Microsoft data center and your own users is at constant risk. Human factors are the main cause of data loss in the cloud, so you need to have a reliable second copy of your data. With third-party backup solutions, data will be reliably protected and can be easily restored at any time.