Dive Brief:
- Microsoft is making several enhancements designed to bolster Office 365’s security and compliance capabilities, the company announced Tuesday.
- Enhancements include the launch Office 365 Threat Intelligence, a new reporting interface to improve the customer experience for Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), extending the ATP Safe Links feature to Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Office 365 ProPlus desktop clients, and the launch of Office 365 Advanced Data Governance.
- Extending safe links across products is part of Microsoft's recognition that cyberattacks can occur beyond the scope of email. Now, if a customer clicks a link in an Office 365 application, the ATP will inspect to see if its malicious.
Dive Insight:
Microsoft has worked hard to further improve Office 365's appeal to enterprise users, and bolstering security is one more way to do so.
Overall, competition has been hot in the cloud-based workplace productivity area as more businesses move away from out-of-the-box workplace productivity software to online-based tools.
Competition between Microsoft's Office 365 and Google for Work, in particular, has been fierce, and both companies are looking for areas to one-up each other. Both companies have also been polishing up existing offerings lately.
Last month, Microsoft announced it added two enterprise-focused enhancements to its Skype for Business phone and web conferencing service, while Google revamped its enterprise collaboration tool, Hangouts, to better server businesses.
