The Scareware Blocker is a New feature in Microsoft Edge designed to protect users from tech support scams, often referred to as scareware. These scams use aggressive web pages to trick users into thinking their system is infected with malware, pressuring them to call fake tech support numbers. Scareware blockers use a machine learning model to recognize the tell-tale signs of scareware scams and put users back in control of their computer.
Here’s how it works:
Machine Learning: It uses a machine learning model to detect and block scareware sites.
User Control: When a suspicious site is detected, Edge blocks it and shows a warning message, giving users the option to close the page or proceed if they believe it’s safe
“Scareware” scams are a particularly convincing type of tech support scam. They use aggressive web pages to convince victims into thinking their system is infected with malware, pressure them to call a fake tech support number, and try to gain access to the computer. Last year, Hollywood even made a blockbuster action movie with scareware scammers as the villains.
To enable Scareware Blocker in Microsoft Edge:
Open Edge and click on the three-dot menu in the toolbar.
Select Settings.
Navigate to Privacy, search, and services.
Find the Scareware Blocker option and toggle it on
When scareware blocker suspects a page is a scam, Edge will put users back in control by exiting full screen mode, stopping aggressive audio playback, warning the user, and showing a thumbnail of the page they were just viewing:
Scareware blocker fights tech scams – Video Tutorial
Microsoft 365 Copilot is a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine that provides AI-powered productivity capabilities by coordinating the following components:
Large language models (LLMs)
Content in Microsoft Graph, such as emails, chats, and documents that you have permission to access.
The Microsoft 365 productivity apps that you use every day, such as Word and PowerPoint.
How does Microsoft 365 Copilot use your proprietary organizational data?
Microsoft 365 Copilot provides value by connecting LLMs to your organizational data. Microsoft 365 Copilot accesses content and context through Microsoft Graph. It can generate responses anchored in your organizational data, such as user documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, and contacts. Microsoft 365 Copilot combines this content with the user’s working context, such as the meeting a user is in now, the email exchanges the user had on a topic, or the chat conversations the user had last week. Microsoft 365 Copilot uses this combination of content and context to help provide accurate, relevant, and contextual responses.
Microsoft 365 Copilot only surfaces organizational data to which individual users have at least view permissions. It’s important that you’re using the permission models available in Microsoft 365 services, such as SharePoint, to help ensure the right users or groups have the right access to the right content within your organization. This includes permissions you give to users outside your organization through inter-tenant collaboration solutions, such as shared channels in Microsoft Teams.
When you enter prompts using Microsoft 365 Copilot, the information contained within your prompts, the data they retrieve, and the generated responses remain within the Microsoft 365 service boundary, in keeping with our current privacy, security, and compliance commitments. Microsoft 365 Copilot uses Azure OpenAI services for processing, not OpenAI’s publicly available services. Azure OpenAI doesn’t cache customer content and Copilot modified prompts for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Data stored about user interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot
When a user interacts with Microsoft 365 Copilot (using apps such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Loop, or Whiteboard), we store data about these interactions. The stored data includes the user’s prompt and Copilot’s response, including citations to any information used to ground Copilot’s response. We refer to the user’s prompt and Copilot’s response to that prompt as the “content of interactions” and the record of those interactions is the user’s Copilot activity history. For example, this stored data provides users with Copilot activity history in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat (previously named Business Chat) and meetings in Microsoft Teams. This data is processed and stored in alignment with contractual commitments with your organization’s other content in Microsoft 365. The data is encrypted while it’s stored and isn’t used to train foundation LLMs, including those used by Microsoft 365 Copilot.
To view and manage this stored data, admins can use Content search or Microsoft Purview. Admins can also use Microsoft Purview to set retention policies for the data related to chat interactions with Copilot. For Microsoft Teams chats with Copilot, admins can also use Microsoft Teams Export APIs to view the stored data.
Deleting the history of user interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot calls to the LLM are routed to the closest data centers in the region, but also can call into other regions where capacity is available during high utilization periods.
For European Union (EU) users, we have additional safeguards to comply with the EU Data Boundary. EU traffic stays within the EU Data Boundary while worldwide traffic can be sent to the EU and other countries or regions for LLM processing. The EU Data Boundary is a geographically defined boundary within which Microsoft has committed to store and process Customer Data and personal data for our Microsoft enterprise online services, including Azure, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365, subject to limited circumstances where Customer Data and personal data will continue to be transferred outside the EU Data Boundary.
How does Microsoft 365 Copilot protect organizational data?
The permissions model within your Microsoft 365 tenant can help ensure that data won’t unintentionally leak between users, groups, and tenants. Microsoft 365 Copilot presents only data that each individual can access using the same underlying controls for data access used in other Microsoft 365 services. Semantic Index honors the user identity-based access boundary so that the grounding process only accesses content that the current user is authorized to access.
Copilot works together with your Microsoft Purviewsensitivity labels and encryption to provide an extra layer of protection. The following diagram provides a visual representation of how Copilot honors your information protection controls using sensitivity labels and encryption.
Copilot will only work with your M365 tenant data and won’t be able to access other companies’ data. Plus, your data doesn’t train the AI for other companies to leverage..
Migrating from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 can be a daunting task, especially when dealing with mailboxes over 100 GB. This guide provides an in-depth look at the challenges and solutions for a successful migration, catering to both normal and large mailboxes.
Assessment and Planning
Before initiating the migration, it’s crucial to carry out a thorough assessment of your current Google Workspace environment. Identify the number of users, mailbox sizes, and any potential issues that might arise. Planning should include:
Identifying key stakeholders
Defining the migration timeline
Determining the migration method
Allocating resources and roles
You can migrate the following functionalities from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 or Office 365:
Mail & Rules Calendar Contacts
You can migrate batches of users from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 or Office 365, allowing a migration project to be done in stages. This migration requires that you provision all of your users who will be migrated as mail-enabled users outside of the migration process. You must specify a list of users to migrate for each batch.
All procedures in this article assume that your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 domain is verified and that your TXT records have been set up. For more information, see Set up your domain (host-specific instructions).
Select your method of migration
You can migrate from Google Workspace using any of the following methods:
Automated – through the Exchange admin center
Manual – through the Exchange admin center
PowerShell
Migration limitations
Important Microsoft’s data migration tool is currently unaware of tools enforcing messaging records management (MRM) or archival policies. Because of this, any messages that are deleted or moved to archive by these policies will result in the migration process flagging these items as “missing”. The result is perceived data loss rather than actual data loss, which makes it much harder to identify actual data loss during any content verification checks. Therefore, Microsoft strongly recommends disabling all MRM and archival policies before attempting any data migration to mailboxes.
Note The largest single email message that can be migrated is based on the transport configuration for your configuration. The default limit is 35 MB. To increase this limit, see Office 365 now supports larger email messages.
Throughput limitations for contacts and calendars completely depend on the quota restrictions for your tenant’s service account on the Google Workspace side.
Other migration limitations are described in the following table:
Data type
Limitations
Mail
Vacation settings, Automatic reply settings
Meeting rooms
Room bookings won’t be migrated
Calendar
Shared calendars and event colors won’t be migrated
Contacts
A maximum of three email addresses per contact are migrated over
Contacts
Gmail tags, contact URLs, and custom tags won’t be migrated
Google Workspace migration prerequisites in Exchange Online
The following procedures must be performed (in the order mentioned) before you start the process of Google Workspace migration:
Create a subdomain for mail routing to Microsoft 365 or Office 365
Create a subdomain for mail routing to your Google Workspace domain
Provision users in Microsoft 365 or Office 365
Create a subdomain for mail routing to Microsoft 365
Note The option Add a domain won’t be available if using the legacy free edition of G Suite.
Enter the domain that you’ll use for routing mails to Microsoft 365 or Office 365, select User alias domain, and then select ADD DOMAIN & START VERIFICATION. A subdomain of your primary domain is recommended (for example, “m365mail.domain.com”, when “domain.com” is your primary domain) so that it will be automatically verified. If another domain (such as “domain.onmicrosoft.com”) is set, Google will send emails to each individual address with a link to verify the permission to route mail. Migration won’t complete until the verification is completed.
Note If you see an error GmailForwardingAddressRequiresVerificationException has occurred during the batch, skip this step of creating a subdomain for forwarding emails from the gmail side.
Follow any subsequent steps that are then required to verify your domain till the status is shown as Active. If you chose a subdomain of your primary domain (created in step 3), your new domain may have been verified automatically.
Sign in to your DNS provider and update your DNS records so that you have an MX record at the domain you created (in step 3), pointing to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. Ensure that this domain (created in step 3) is an accepted domain in Microsoft 365 or Office 365. Follow the instructions in Add a domain to Microsoft 365 to add the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 routing domain (“m365mail.domain.com”) to your organization and to configure DNS to route mail to Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
Note The migration process won’t be able to complete if an unverified routing domain is used. Choosing the built-in “tenantname.onmicrosoft.com” domain for routing mail to Office 365 instead of a subdomain of the primary Google Workspace domain occasionally causes issues that Microsoft is not able to assist with, besides causing Microsoft to recommend that the user manually verify the forwarding address or contact Google support.
Create a subdomain for mail routing to your Google Workspace domain
Enter the domain that you’ll use for routing mails to Google Workspace, select User alias domain, and then select ADD DOMAIN & START VERIFICATION. A subdomain of your primary domain is recommended (for example, “gsuite.domain.com”, when “domain.com” is your primary domain) so that it will be automatically verified.
Follow any subsequent steps that are then required to verify your domain till your domain’s status is shown as Active. If you chose a subdomain of your primary domain (created in step 3), your new domain may have been verified automatically.
Note It may take up to 24 hours for Google to propagate this setting to all the users in your organization.
Important If you are using non-default Transport settings in your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization, you should check whether the mail flow will work from Office 365 to Google Workspace. Ensure that either your default Remote Domain (“*”) has Automatic Forwarding enabled, or that there is a new Remote Domain for your Google Workspace routing domain (for example, “gsuite.domain.com“) that has Automatic Forwarding enabled.
Check Google Cloud platform permissions
An automated scenario requires the Google Migration administrator to be able to perform the following steps in the Google admin console:
Create a Google Workspace project.
Create a Google Workspace service account in the project.
Create a service key.
Enable all APIs – Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts.
The Google Migration administrator needs the following permissions to complete these steps:
resourcemanager.projects.create
iam.ServiceAccounts.create
The most secure way to achieve completion of these four steps is to assign the following roles to the Google Migration administrator:
Select the appropriate resource and in the right-hand pane under the Permissions tab, select Add Principal.
Enter your Google Migration administrator credentials, enter Project Creator in the filter, and select Project Creator. Select Add Another Role, enter Create Service Accounts in the filter, and select Create Service Accounts. Select Save.
Note It might take up to 15 minutes to propagate role assignment changes across the globe.
Provision users in Microsoft 365. Once your Google Workspace environment has been properly configured, you can complete your migration in the Exchange admin center or through the Exchange Online PowerShell. Before proceeding with either method, ensure that Mail Users have been provisioned for every user in the organization who will be migrated (either now or eventually). If any users aren’t provisioned, provision them using the instructions in Manage mail users.
Very Important Note Microsoft recommend that the Default MRM Policy and Archive policies be disabled for these users until their migration has been completed. When such features remain enabled during migration, there is a chance that some messages will end up being considered “missing” during the content verification process.
Start an automated Google Workspace migration batch in EAC
Give migration batch a unique name: Enter a unique name.
Select the mailbox migration path: Verify that Migration to Exchange Online is selected.
When you’re finished, click Next.
On the Select the migration type page, select Google Workspace (Gmail) migration as migration type, and click Next.
The Prerequisites for Google Workspace migration page appears.
Verify that the Automate the configuration of your Google Workspace for migration section is expanded, and then select Start in that section to automate the four required prerequisite steps.
In the Google sign-in page that appears, sign in to your Google account to validate your APIs.
Once the APIs are successfully validated, the following things happen:
A JSON file (projectid-*.json) is downloaded to your local system.
The link to add the ClientID and the Scope is provided. The ClientID and Scope are also listed for your reference.
Select the API access link. You’ll be redirected to Google Admin API Controls page.
Select Add new. Copy the ClientID and Scope from the EAC, paste it here, and then select Authorize.
Once the four prerequisites-related steps are completed, select Next. The Set a migration endpoint page appears.
Select one of the following options:
Select the migration endpoint: Select an existing migration endpoint from the drop-down list.
Create a new migration endpoint: Select this option if you’re a first-time user.
Note To migrate Gmail mailboxes successfully, Microsoft 365 or Office 365 needs to connect and communicate with Gmail. To do this connection-communication, Microsoft 365 or Office 365 uses a migration endpoint. Migration endpoint is a technical term that describes the settings that are used to create the connection so you can migrate the mailboxes.
If you’ve selected Create a new migration endpoint, do the following steps:
On the General Information page, configure the following settings:
Migration Endpoint Name: Enter a value.
Maximum concurrent migrations: Leave the default value 20 or change the value as required.
Maximum concurrent incremental syncs: Leave the default value 10 or change the value as required. When you’re finished, select Next.
On the Gmail migration configuration page, configure the following settings:
Email address: Enter the email address that you use to sign in to the Google Workspace.
JSON key: Select Import JSON. In the dialog box that appears, find and select the downloaded JSON file, and then select Open. Once the endpoint is successfully created, it will be listed in the Select migration endpoint drop-down list.
Select the endpoint from the drop-down list, and select Next. The Add user mailboxes page appears.
Select Import CSV file and navigate to the folder where you’ve saved the CSV file.
If you haven’t already saved or created the CSV file, create a CSV file containing the set of names of the users you want to migrate. You’ll need its filename below. The allowed headers are:
EmailAddress (required): Contains the primary email address for an existing Microsoft 365 or Office 365 mailbox.
Username (optional). Contains the Gmail primary email address, if it differs from EmailAddress.
CSV Format
EmailAddress will@domain.com user123@domain.com
When you’re finished, click Next. The Move configuration page appears.
From the Target delivery domain drop-down list, select the target delivery domain (the subdomain) that was created as part of fulfilling the Google Workspace migration prerequisites in Exchange Online, and click Next.
Note The target delivery domain (the subdomain) you select in this step can be either an existing one or the one that you’ve created in Google Workspace migration prerequisites in Exchange Online (eg. M365mail.domain.com).
If you don’t see the target delivery domain that you want to select in the Target delivery domain drop-down list, you can manually enter the name of the target delivery domain in the text box.
The text box in which you manually enter the name of the target delivery domain is Target delivery domain. That is, the text box is effectively the Target delivery domain drop-down list, which is taking the role of a text box when you manually enter text into it.
Filtering options have been introduced for the migration of Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. For more information on these filtering options.
On the Schedule batch migration page, verify all the details, click Save, and then click Done.
Once the batch status changes from Syncing to Synced, you need to complete the batch.
In Part II we will describe how to handle the large mailboxes (>100 GB) and the challenges we will face. Stay tuned 😊
Microsoft Defender for Cloud integrates both Microsoft Copilot for Security and Microsoft Copilot for Azure into its experience. With these integrations, you can ask security-related questions, receive responses, and automatically trigger the necessary skills needed to analyze, summarize, remediate, and delegate recommendations using natural language prompts.
Both Copilot for Security and Copilot for Azure are cloud-based AI platforms that provide a natural language copilot experience. They assist security professionals in understanding the context and effect of recommendations, remediating or delegating tasks, and addressing misconfiguration in code.
How Copilot works in Defender for Cloud
Defender for Cloud integrates Copilot directly in to the Defender for Cloud experience. This integration allows you to analyze, summarize, remediate, and delegate your recommendations with natural language prompts.
When you open Copilot, you can use natural language prompts to ask questions about the recommendations. Copilot provides you with a response in natural language that helps you understand the context of the recommendation. It also explains the effect of implementing the recommendation and provides steps to take for implementation.
Some sample prompts include:
Show critical risks for publicly exposed resources
Show critical risks to sensitive data
Show resources with high severity vulnerabilities
Copilot can assist with refining recommendations, providing summaries, remediation steps, and delegation. It enhances your ability to analyze and act on recommendations.
Step-by-Step: Protect Your Usage of Copilot for M365 Using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
As Microsoft cloud services have grown over the years, the domain space they live on has grown as well – into the hundreds. Over time, this fragmentation has created increasing challenges for end user navigation, administrative simplicity, and the development of cross-app experiences. Microsoft’s announcement, “cloud.microsoft is the new unified domain for Microsoft 365 apps and services.” It promises greater security and unified experience.
Why cloud.microsoft?
‘Dot brand’ top-level domains like .microsoft are an established method for enhancing the security, trustworthiness, and integrity of an organization’s web offerings. Similar to how the US government has exclusive rights to the .gov top-level domain (TLD), Microsoft has exclusive rights to the .microsoft TLD. Exclusive ownership enables enhanced security protocols and governance controls, and the value of security investments done at the top-level domain seamlessly accrue to the apps. And all experiences hosted on the .microsoft domain can be assumed to be legitimate and authentic: anyone attempting domain spoofing would have to go through Microsoft itself, as we are both the registry operator and sole registrant for this exclusive, trusted namespace. A common term before the “dot” is also necessary in order to realize the full benefits of a unified domain. “Cloud” was selected as a durable, extensible, neutral term with a meaningful relationship to the wide range of services that will come under its umbrella, starting with Microsoft 365.
Microsoft will be retiring the Send password in email feature from Microsoft 365 admin center starting August 30, 2024. Instead, Microsoft recommend using the new Printoption in the Microsoft admin center to save the user account details and share them in a secure manner with your users.
Admins will no longer be able to receive usernames and passwords in email after this change is implemented. This change will happen automatically by the specified date. No admin action is required.
On the 25th of April, Microsoft announced a robust set of multi-tenant organization (MTO) capabilities within Microsoft 365, now generally available to enhance any organization’s collaboration, communication, and administration across multiple tenants. These capabilities span Microsoft 365 People Search, Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage and Microsoft Defender XDR, which can be enabled via the Microsoft 365 admin center or Microsoft Entra admin center.
This segmentation can cause frustration when users need to communicate and collaborate across tenant boundaries, whilst IT admins need to perform the same set of administrative tasks per tenant to maintain their organization.
A diagram showing multiple tenants within a single organization.
The capabilities we discuss below help multi-tenant organizations address these complexities, while staying compliant and secure:
Find people across organizations easily: Search for and communicate with colleagues in a unified manner with improved people search. Every search now returns a single, accurate result, simplifying how you connect with the right colleague.
Streamlined workforce collaboration: Engage in calls, chats, and meetings across tenants without the barriers of meeting lobbies. Enjoy immediate access to meeting content and collaborative tools in real time.
Unlock new ways for employees and leaders to connect: We’ve broadened the capabilities in Viva Engage, facilitating cross-tenant announcements and enabling community interaction and campaign participation that extend beyond tenant boundaries.
Manage incidents across tenants: Microsoft Defender XDR provides a single, unified view of all tenants your organization manages, allowing for swift incident investigation and advanced threat hunting without the need to switch between tenant views.
Simplify multi-tenant management: The newly defined multi-tenant organization boundary in Microsoft Entra ID P1 simplifies the enablement, configuration and management of the capabilities above. Whether through Microsoft Graph APIs or the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, setting up is intuitive and straightforward.
Find people across organizations easily with People Search
The multi-tenant organization (MTO) People Search is a collaboration feature that enables search and discovery of people across multiple tenants. A tenant admin can enable cross-tenant synchronization that allows users to be synced to another tenant and be discoverable in its global address list. Once enabled, users can search and discover synced user profiles from the other tenant and view their corresponding people cards.
An image showing a synchronized user profile from another tenant in Microsoft 365
Streamline workforce collaboration with Microsoft Teams
Once administrators form a multi-tenant organization in the Entra ID platform organizations with the new Teams desktop client will automatically receive the Teams MTO features with no additional configuration. Users can now join a meeting, chat, call, or collaborate in a channel hosted by another tenant, and simultaneously compose chat messages in their own tenant. Users can receive cross-tenant notifications for all accounts and tenants added to the Teams client, no matter which one is currently in focus. People’s search is also improved. Searches for coworkers in a multi-tenant organization could often return multiple results for the same person. With the new MTO capabilities in the new Teams client, searching for a coworker in an MTO will return a single result, helping you to identify the correct colleague and keep your conversations in one place.
The new Teams desktop client showing improved people search capability on the right hand side Users that join a meeting in another tenant can now bypass the meeting lobby, have access to all in-meeting content and resources and can collaborate in real time.
Manage incidents across tenants with Microsoft Defender XDR
Security operations teams that work with multiple tenants need a reliable and comprehensive security solution that can keep up with modern threats and provide unified and connected experience to enhance their security operations. Microsoft Defender XDR now delivers unified investigation and response experience for multi-tenant organizations alongside native protection across endpoints, identities, email, collaboration tools, cloud apps, and data.
With multi-tenant management in Microsoft Defender XDR, security operations teams can quickly investigate incidents and perform advanced hunting across data from multiple tenants, removing the need for administrators to log in and out of each individual tenant.
Enable Microsoft 365 multi-tenant capabilities with Microsoft Entra ID
Multi-tenant organization platform capabilities are now rolling out to standard production tenants in Microsoft 365. To deliver the above capabilities, administrators can enable multi-tenant capabilities in the Microsoft 365 admin center and configure which users in the organization can take advantage of multi-tenant capabilities using either Microsoft 365 admin center or Microsoft Entra admin center.
This approach allows you to define a boundary around the Entra ID tenants that your organization owns, facilitated by an invite-and-accept flow between tenant administrators. Learn more about the process in the Microsoft 365 admin center here and using Microsoft Graph API’s here. We recommend the use of the Microsoft 365 admin center to simplify the setup experience and to view your newly created MTO:
Snapshot of a multitenant organization collaboration with three tenants.
Following the formation of the multi-tenant organization, Microsoft offers two methods to provision employees into neighboring multi-tenant organization tenants at scale.
For a simplified experience, stay in the Microsoft 365 admin center to sync users into multiple tenants in your multi-tenant organization. Microsoft recommend this method for smaller multi-tenant organizations who plan on all employees receiving access to all multi-tenant organization tenants.
For a customizable sync experience, head over to Entra ID cross-tenant synchronization. Cross-tenant synchronization is highly configurable and allows the provisioning of any multi-hub multi-spoke identity landscape. We recommend this method for enterprise organizations of complex identity landscapes. Either method works. Choose the one that works best for your specific organization!
Today, March 13, Microsoft announce the public preview release of Microsoft Security Exposure Management. This transformative solution unifies disparate data silos, extending end-to-end visibility to security teams across all assets. By enabling a thorough assessment of security posture and exposure, this solution equips teams to not only grasp their current security landscape but also elevate it to new heights. Microsoft Security Exposure Management serves as a cornerstone for proactive risk management, empowering organizations to adeptly navigate and mitigate threat exposure across their entire attack surface.
Microsoft Security Exposure Management empowers customers to:
Build an effective exposure management program with a continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) process.
Reduce risk with a clear view of every asset and real-time assessment of potential exposures both inside-out and outside-in.
Identify and classify critical assets, ensuring they are protected against a wide variety of threats.
Discover and visualize potential adversary intrusion paths, including lateral movement, to proactively identify and stop attacker activity.
Communicate exposure risk to business leaders and stakeholders with clear KPIs and actionable insights.
Enhance exposure analysis and remediation by integrating with third-party data sources and tools
At launch, we are introducing new capabilities that are foundational to exposure management programs:
Attack Surface Management: Provides a comprehensive view of the entire attack surface, allowing the exploration of assets and their relationships.
Attack Path Analysis: Assists security teams in visualizing and prioritizing attack paths and risks across environments, enabling focused remediation efforts to reduce exposure and breach likelihood.
Unified Exposure Insights: Provides decision-makers with a consolidated, clear view of an organization’s threat exposure, facilitating security teams in addressing critical questions about security posture.
Microsoft 365 Backup is currently in preview and will begin rolling out to organizations in early 2024. You can set up billing for the product as described in Set up Microsoft 365 Backup. Once Microsoft 365 Backup has been deployed and is available for use in your tenant, you’ll see it in the Microsoft 365 admin center page under Settings.
During the preview period, performance and speed of web interfaces, initial configuration, and restores might be slower than expected as we scale up our infrastructure to remove undesirable latency from our system.
Business continuity assurance is a top-of-mind concern for many companies. Microsoft 365 Backup delivers business continuity peace of mind by providing performance and reliable restore confidence. When evaluating a backup and restore offering, what really matters isn’t solely the backup, but the ability to restore your data to a healthy state quickly when you need to do so. Recovering large volumes of content is difficult when copying data at a scale from a remote, air-gapped location requiring weeks or even months to get your business back up and running.
In cases of a ransomware attack that encrypts large swaths of your data, or instances of an internal accidental or malicious data deletion or overwrite event, you need to be able to get your business back to a healthy state as soon as possible. This is what the Microsoft 365 Backup product offers, both through the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as via third-party applications built on the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform.
To summarize, applications built on top of the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform deliver the following benefits regardless of the size or scale of the protected tenant:
Full SharePoint site and OneDrive account restore fidelity, meaning the site and OneDrive are restored to their exact state at specific prior points in time via a rollback operation
In the future, roll forward granular file-level restores in OneDrive and SharePoint
Full Exchange mailbox item restores or granular item restores using search
Consolidated security and compliance domain management
Walkthrough an overview of Microsoft 365 Backup here…
Architecture
Microsoft 365 Backup provides ultra-fast backup and restore capabilities by creating backups within the protected services’ data boundaries.
Microsoft 365 Backup not only provides uniquely fast recovery from common business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) scenarios like ransomware or accidental/malicious employee content overwrite/deletion. Additional BCDR scenario protections are also built directly into the service. For example, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online provide replicated copies of your data across geographically disparate datacenters to automatically protect against physical disasters and automatically failover to live active copies seamlessly without the need for end customer intervention.
Our backups are protected from malicious overwrites because OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange use Append-Only storage. This means that SharePoint can only add new content blobs and can never change old ones until they’re permanently deleted. The Exchange items are backed up in an immutable manner and can’t be accessed by a client process (such as Outlook, OWA, or MFCMAPI). This process ensures that items can’t be changed or corrupted after an initial save, protecting against attackers that try to corrupt old versions. For More information about the built-in service and data resiliency, see SharePoint and OneDrive data resiliency in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online data resiliency in Microsoft 365.
Key architectural takeaways:
Data never leaves the Microsoft 365 data trust boundary or the geographic locations of your current data residency.
The backups are immutable unless expressly deleted by the Backup tool admin via product offboarding.
OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange have multiple physically redundant copies of your data to protect against physical disasters.
Catastrophic Failure 