You may think that data stored in an in-house data center is in more secure hands than data in the cloud. But that may not be true. In fact, there is a wide range of security features that you can take advantage of when you put your data in a cloud service like Office 365.
Check these added security benefits which may convince you for
:When your on-premises servers are attacked externally, you can take steps to protect yourself from subsequent attacks from that culprit. With Office 365, instead of simply reacting to individual attacks, you will gain the benefit of intelligence gathered from threats against other customers within the service as well. An attack launched against any organization in Office 365 can functionally inoculate everyone else.
When the cloud first came out, they were mostly based on the same on-premises products that you always used—except they were deployed and managed on servers owned by the provider. Today, cloud services have changed to dramatically simplify configuration options, server roles, and management complexity. This simplification gives services the ability to consolidate how they protect, detect, and respond to threats. Since the software is the main source of interaction, illicit activity by cybercriminals is easier to identify.
Office 365 security teams face two key pressures when building security capabilities: Every feature breaks at some scale, and every customer brings a particular set of concerns and requirements. Microsoft finds that a robust set of well-designed and implemented capabilities may address most customer concerns, but the growth of the cloud service constantly challenges the design. These factors challenge Office 365 to innovate on a regular basis.
A crucial part of security is by making your breach boundary as small as possible. Sensitive assets should be isolated from each other, so it will be difficult for an attacker to move from one asset to another. Most companies draw their breach boundaries at the directory level. If an attacker can acquire domain admin privileges, they can access any information managed in that domain. When you subscribe to cloud services, it is more difficult for the attacker to breach your domain and gain access to any of the data in the cloud service beyond normal “front-door” access to the services which are audited. The delegation of management to a third party gives you a more secure breach boundary.
Office 365 has one security feature that we really love: transparency. With many organizations using Office 365, Microsoft is compelled to operate in the full light of day. Microsoft allows their customers to control how a Microsoft support engineer accesses their data. The Office 365 business model relies profoundly on the belief that there are no shortcuts and no excuses when it comes to the security of your data.
For anyone who is currently facing doubts about migrating to Office 365—based on a set of objections relating to security in the cloud— I hope the security features I mentioned above solve your concerns.