Microsoft rolls out new tools for enterprise security and compliance teams

Microsoft has announced a number of new capabilities and improvements for tools used by enterprise administrators.

New Microsoft 365 security and compliance centers

The new Microsoft 365 security center allows security administrators and other risk management professionals to manage and take full advantage of Microsoft 365 intelligent security solutions for identity and access management, threat protection, information protection, and security management.

Microsoft 365 enterprise security

The new Microsoft 365 compliance center allows compliance, privacy, and risk management professionals to assess their organization’s compliance risks, protect and govern the organization’s data with sensitivity and retention labels, respond to regulatory requests and provides access to additional compliance and privacy solutions.

“The new specialized workspaces enable your security and compliance teams to have centralized management across your Microsoft 365 services, bringing together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), with several Azure capabilities,” Microsoft noted.

The security center provides visibility into the organization’s security posture and allows admins to determine the actions best suited to improving it. The compliance center allows the discovery of compliance risks, shadow IT, employees’ non-compliant behaviors, etc.

Both centers also have a new alerts page through which admins can review Microsoft Cloud App Security alerts related to Office apps and services. (The alerts can be also integrated with the company’s SIEM or self-created solution.)

Both centers will be available to admins worldwide by the end of March.

A new compliance supervision solution

Microsoft is also rolling out a new supervision solution for monitoring digital communications for regulatory compliance, compliance to corporate policies, and to identify and manage legal exposure and other risks before they damage corporate reputation and operations.

“With Supervision policies, you can monitor internal or external Exchange email, Microsoft Teams chats and channels, or 3rd-party communication in your organization,” the company explained.

Admins can pinpoint things like the use of inappropriate language, flag sensitive information (financial, medical and health or privacy), etc. Many of the actions available – message filtering, reviewing, tagging, resolving of items, auditing, reporting – can be performed via the security and compliance centers.

Microsoft will finish rolling out the new Supervision updates in the next few weeks. The company notes, though, that all users monitored by supervision policies must have either an Office 365 Enterprise E3 license with the Advanced Compliance add-on or be included in an Office 365 Enterprise E5 subscription.

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