The Security Benefits of moving to Microsoft Teams

Regardless of the size of your organisation, security is always a key concern. Procedures and measures need to be in place to ensure you offer a safe, compliant and secure environment for your workforce.

Adhering to security regulations and compliance can be a real headache for businesses, regardless of their size. Microsoft understands this need for security and Teams security standards echo those of Office 365, ensuring your business remains compliant.

Microsoft has added high level security and compliance to Teams in the following categories:

• Auditing & reporting
• Content search
• Conditional access
• eDiscovery
• Identity models & authentication
• Information barriers
• Legal hold
• Licensing
• Location of data
• Retention policies

A comprehensive list that they believe covers the security and compliance needs of businesses of all sizes. Teams has truly been designed to be a one-stop-shop for all business collaboration activities and therefore the security categories should cover every eventuality.

Auditing and Reporting

A useful tool for viewing the edit and deletion history of documents. Visibility of this history is not limited to just Teams but also covers all of Microsoft's offerings including SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Azure Active Directory.

Content Search

Content Search eDiscovery tools can be used to search for emails, documents and conversations within your business. As with Auditing, this is a cross product function. Statistics can be viewed from searches and reports compiled on these.

Conditional Access

Conditional Access allows access to services only when certain conditions are met. Ensuring security whenever logins are attempted. If the pre-defined conditions and controls are not met then access will be blocked.

eDiscovery

Microsoft's official definition is, “electronic discovery is the electronic aspect of identifying, collecting and producing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to a request for production in a lawsuit or investigation.” 

There are times when an organisation or business requires access to ESI for legal reasons. Microsoft Teams uses Office 365s Security and Compliance centre to easily find this data, depending on licensing you'll be able to conduct both in-place eDiscovery and Advanced eDiscovery.

Identity Models and Authentication

Microsoft has synced its Identity and Authentication models in Teams to those of Office 365. Along with Multi factor authentication, this increases the security levels for teams based on it's 3 models; Cloud Identity, Synchronised Identity and Federated Identity.

Information Barriers

One of the biggest concerns to a business is information being shared where it shouldn't be. Information Barriers are admin-configurable policies that prevent individuals or entire groups from communicating with each other. Meaning information that is only for the eyes of a select group or individual can never be shared outside of that group.

Legal Hold

Legal Hold allows administrators to place an account on hold, preserving all data in the inbox. This process can be used in legal issues and investigations.  As the hold is placed on the mailbox, if the end user tries to cover their tracks by deleting or editing content, the original will still remain within the mailbox.

Licensing

Microsoft have made their licensing structure for security and compliance of Teams straightforward. Emphasis is made on E3 and E5 to give the best overall security.

Location of Data

Data resides in the location of your Office 365 tenant.  Teams is supported in EMEA, APAC, Americas, Canada, Australia, India and Japan.

Full licensing details can be found here.

Retention Policies

The default retention policy for Teams is to retain everything forever. Whilst this is great for compliance, Microsoft recognise the need to delete data if it has been held for a certain amount of time and therefore has added fully customisable deletion and retention policies. 

Retention policies can be customised for both channel messages and private messages.

Why Wavenet?

Wavenet have over 20 years experience in voice technologies working with businesses across the UK to deliver high-quality, reliable voice and phone systems. With TeamsLink we have partnered with Microsoft to create a platform that provides on-net, high quality traffic through diverse routes to give your business the ultimate unified communications foundation.

We have an internal development team dedicated to advancing our technology and providing our customers with the best solution on the market. As well as our own developers we are partnered with vendors that can provide Microsoft Certified handsets that run Teams directly on-screen, giving you the choice of how you roll out Teams calling to your users.