Office 365 to get encrypted storage in July, Android and iOS device management later this year, and DLP in June

In addition to all the developer-focused news at its TechEd North America 2014 conference today, Microsoft has also made several IT Pro announcements around Office 365. The company is planning to offer encrypted storage via a feature codenamed Fort Knox, mobile device management Android and iOS phones, as well as data loss protection (DLP) in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

First off, the company’s latest encryption feature will start rolling out to Office 365 business customers beginning in July. The Fort Knox technology moves beyond a single encryption key per disk to deliver a unique encryption key per file, meaning every file stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business is encrypted with its own key, as are subsequent updates to each file.

Furthermore, Fort Knox also distributes a customer’s files across multiple Microsoft Azure Storage containers, each with separate credentials. Not only does this mean they aren’t store in a single database, but the map of file locations is encrypted itself, and master encryption keys are separated from both content and the file map.

Later this year, Office 365 users will be able to access corporate data from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive for Business, and OWA mobile in a protected manner based on IT policy defined through Windows Intune. This means IT departments will be able to apply policies across Office mobile apps to allow their users to create, view, edit, and share content only between managed applications, including on Android and iOS phones.

Next up, in June Microsoft will bring the DLP capability available in Exchange to documents stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business for Office 365 Enterprise E3 customers. DLP prevents the sharing of sensitive content either inside or outside an organization by using deep content analysis to automatically classify and identify a customer’s data at rest.

Last but not least, Microsoft is relaunching its Office 365 Trust Center information portal with informational videos and deeper dives via whitepapers and blogs. You can read more about the content provided here: From inside the cloud.

Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble