Microsoft announces Advanced Security Management for Office 365

The Office Blog announced today that Office 365’s new Advance Security Management features will begin rolling out now to give organization better control over their data. The new Advance Security Management features are powered by Microsoft Cloud App Security, which was first introduced in late February.

The focus of Advance Security Management is to better understand and protect, from what is described as your organization’s shadow IT. The shadow IT is all of the cloud services and apps employees connect to and use but are unsanctioned or not administered by your organization. The hope is with Advance Security Management organizations will gain transparency over their shadow IT, allowing them to control flows of information and prevent breaches in security.

Advanced Security Management includes the following three new features:

• Threat Detection — Helps you identify high-risk and abnormal usage, and security incidents.
• Enhanced control — Shapes your Office 365 environment leveraging granular controls and security policies.
• Discovery and Insights — Get enhanced visibility into your Office 365 usage and shadow IT without installing an endpoint agent.

Advanced Security Management begins rolling out today to Office 365 E5 plan as an included feature. Other Office 365 plans can add Advance Security Management to their plan for an addition $3 per month. Threat detection and activity policy creation will be enabled starting today, but the ability to view application permissions and the application discovery dashboard will not be available until sometime in the third quarter.