What every Office 365 Administrator should know
November 18, 2016By Bala Murugesan – Microsoft Cloud Specialist, Data#3
[Reading time: 3 mins]
Office 365 Security and Compliance Centre
The Microsoft Office 365 team has continued to introduce new security features and capabilities into the product, while at the same time gaining accreditation around the world for upholding the highest standards in Cloud security. Over the last few months, there have been major enhancements and updates to the security, privacy and compliance capabilities in Office 365.
It’s important for Office 365 Global Administrators to know the inside and out of the Office 365 Security and Compliance Centre, and in this blog, I would like to take you through an overview of the solution and its current features.
What is Office 365 Security and Compliance Centre?
It’s your one-stop portal for protecting your data in Office 365 (https://protection.office.com). The Office 365 Compliance Centre contains the key compliance-related features for an Office 365 administrator to manage compliance across Office 365, Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online. This new management interface represents Microsoft’s evolving compliance offering, which will eventually span all Office 365 compliance-related features and help customers meet their legal, regulatory, and organisational compliance requirements. Consolidating compliance functionality across services into this single area will make?compliance features easier to access.
Figure 1: Compliance Centre Dashboard
Is it available on my tenancy?
Yes, the access to the Security and Compliance Centre available throughout all the plans. However, some of the features are not available on the business plan. Please refer the following table below for more details:
What’s in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Centre?
To access the Security and Compliance centre follow the below options:
- Go to https://protection.office.com and login with your Office 365 Credential. Please note you need to have right permissions to access the centre – you should be an Office 365 global administrator or a member of one or more Security and Compliance Centre role groups.
- From the Office 365 Admin Portal, navigate to the Admin centres section on the left hand side and click on the Security and Compliance Centre portal link.
Figure 2: Admin Centre
The navigation pane on the left of the Security and Compliance Centre home page gives you easy access to all the pages in the Security and Compliance Centre.:
Figure 3:Security and Compliance Screenshot
The table below lists all the navigation pane options available. Please note that the list of available options can vary depending on the Office 365 business plan you purchased and its roll-out schedule for new features.
| Features | Benefits |
|---|---|
Alerts
| View and manage alerts for your organisation, including Advanced Security Management alerts. |
Permissions | Grant permissions to people who perform compliance tasks like device management, data loss prevention, eDiscovery, and retention. |
Security policies
| Manage devices and set up data loss prevention for your organisation. |
Data management
| Import email from other systems. Enable archive mailboxes or set policies for retaining email and other content within your organisation. |
Search & investigation
| Search for content and review user activity. Use eDiscovery to manage cases and Supervisory review to define policies that help you capture communication for review. |
Reports
| Use a variety of reports to help you understand how your organisation is using Office 365, including reports related to auditing, device management, supervisory review, and data loss prevention. |
Service assurance
| View details about how Microsoft keeps Office 365 customer data safe, and how Office 365 helps customers meet industry compliance requirements. |
In future posts, I will delve into the details of each features functionalities, and explore how it works and how to enable, configure and interact with them.
If you need any assistance, don’t hesitate to contact me or one of the team – hope it helps!
Tags: Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Office 365, Security
