Security Advisor

Securities Exchange

Microsoft is prepping quite a few changes for Exchange 2013 and Exchange Online, including tools to help you keep your corporate data safe.

The No. 1 e-mail server management concern for IT pros is security.

This nugget was brought to you by Michael Atalla, director of product management at Microsoft on the Exchange team, who just finished presenting a keynote at this week's Microsoft Exchange Conference (currently being held for the first time in 10 years in Orlando, Fla.).

According to Atalla (and a Harris poll he was using for reference), two thirds of respondents were "extremely or very concerned about their organizations losing sensitive data without knowing about it." 

Now that we know Atalla knows this fact, what does his team have in store for Exchange to alleviate these fears? How about an overhaul to Exchange's data loss prevention technology. The improved feature can monitor outgoing e-mails through an automated process and, if desired, can stop the transmission of personal information, like credit card numbers and mothers' maiden names.

To help end-users, warning prompts can be customized to let employees know exactly why an e-mail containing the social security numbers of his or her office mates was returned to sender.

Holding onto data with Exchange also gets tightened up with its eDiscovery feature, which can host all your e-mail info (both active and archived) on one server. And to make IT's job of keeping a close eye on all this info easier, "IT administrators can use role-based access control to delegate search, hold, retention policy management, and auditing to HR or legal personnel without providing full administrative privileges. Finally, auditing capabilities built into Exchange can record configuration changes and compliance activities. Audit logs can be used to prove due diligence and, if necessary, pinpoint tampering by an administrator," according to Microsoft.

If you want to know some of the other features making its way into Exchange 2013, check out the whole story here.

About the Author

Chris Paoli (@ChrisPaoli5) is the associate editor for Converge360.

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