Industry Briefings: Knowledge Vault Provides Cloud Auditing

Auditing Office 365 cloud deployments can be difficult. Microsoft provides some rudimentary logging but digging through the log files and commands to get at it is arduous. While there are some on-premise products that have been extended to have some Office 365 auditing capabilities there is a dearth of true cloud-based solutions. Knowledge Vault fills that gap with a 100% cloud-based SaaS offering that can audit Office 365 and on-premise Exchange. I recently met with Christian Ehrenthal, Co-Founder & CEO and Rob Sullivan, Technical Lead for Knowledge Vault to discuss their recent release.

Knowledge Vault is multi-tenant solution that enables IT administrators, Microsoft resellers, and Managed Service Providers to supply cloud-based analytics and auditing to report and alert on a variety of configuration and usage issues including:

On the backed Knowledge Vault runs on Windows Azure and it uses a Big Data Hadoop data store to collect auditing information in conjunction with SQL Server Analysis Services to provide advanced customizable analytics and reporting. Easy single sign-on is available using either a Windows Live account or Azure AD authentication. The current Knowledge Vault release provides connectors for Office 365 and on-premise Exchange. Additional connectors for Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Exchange Online, and Google Gmail are planned. Christian pointed out that getting started with Knowledge Vault was extremely easy with no local installation required whatsoever.

Christian also explained that Knowledge Vault’s ability to report on Office 365 provides a quick ROI for most customers. Office 365’s complex licensing scheme often causes customers to buy licenses that they don’t actually use. Knowledge Vault can show you exactly how you are using your Office 365 licenses. In addition, Knowledge Vault provides a 100+ reports with the ability to save and customize those reports.  

Unlike many cloud products Knowledge Vault offers a simple and straight-forward licensing model. Knowledge Vault is licensed for 25 cents per connector per month. You can find out more and get a free 14 day trail of Knowledge Vault at www.knowledge-vault.com.