Moving your data to the cloud is not a trivial task, not only from technical standpoint but even from user adoption and business justification. Every organization deal with their challenges in different ways, some take the route of implementing least disruptive workload like exchange (mail) and some go with higher business impact workload like SharePoint Online. Which ever route you take one of the fundamental concerns and asks are always around data security and controls. You would always want your team to have a strong control of security while keeping their day to day tasks minimal. This is where Azure and Office 365 can help you pave the right path while you embark on the cloud journey. Office 365 provides various security controls empowering your administrators to keep their data secure at rest and in transit. One of the services protecting your information while your users are focusing on productivity, is Azure Rights Management Services (RMS).
RMS is a complete end to end information protection solution for documents, email, and any unstructured data that is sensitive for your organization. Highly integrated into Office, O365, Windows Server, and 3rd party applications for broad reach and consistent user experience. It covers a broad range of scenarios like
- Sensitive information – What (DLP)?
- Control Access – Devices
- Tracking
- Compliance and Governance
Based on whether you are committing fully to cloud or looking for a hybrid solution below are few deployment options
Cloud Ready
Cloud Accepting
Cloud Reluctant
Protecting Information
RMS manages the policy and key exchanges for encryption. Encryption helps maintain the confidentiality and the integrity of the data. The Policy drives who can access, forward, or even print the document. RMS provides auditing information by logging who, where, when, kind of information. This information is key for executives and for compliance reasons. Microsoft recently announced the RMS Document Tracking preview available worldwide. Pretty neat feature which provides you a peek into what’s going on with your shared document
You get an email with link to tracking. From there you navigate to a full list of shared sessions. From there you can either revoke access, protect in place, etc.
So next time you think about security for your move to the cloud, look at Azure RMS and you’ll be certain your data is protected in transit and at rest, that’ll give you some peace of mind!
Interested in knowing more about Azure security and Controls in Office 365? drop me a note at vaibhav.mathur@perficient.com and talk with one of Azure certified experts.
