Security and Compliance in Office 365: Administration

The purpose of the Security & Compliance center is to provide a central location for advanced administration of Office 365 service components and services. The core menu is broken into separate menu items (blades) that link off to separate administration or services that are only available within the center.

Each section either allows for changes to be made or simply displays settings for review. The core idea is that for auditing, control, management and security a specific center can be used which has its own security.

Based on the license for the Tenant you may also have the ability to utilize the Advanced Security Management components.

From this you are able to view the details of any logged issues as well as create new policies. To create a policy, you can choose the type of policy from the Create policy dropdown.

Selecting an Activity policy, allows you to select an existing template from the dropdown.

Filters can be added either by choosing a single filter, which matches the select options, or a repeated activity. The designer allows you to build a very complex filtering mechanism as needed.

The plus sign allows for extra filtering to be assigned as needed. Email or Text alerts can be set when the policy is matched within the tenant.

Finally, you can set some simple governance for Office 365, which simply has one option to suspend the end user account.

Now that the policy has been created, you can select the Investigate menu item and choose Activity log.

Once loaded you will see the current log of items, that have been captured from the entire tenant.

Clicking on an item will expand further details, will expand the item revealing further content captured.

Clicking at the end of the row you can click the links to expand and see further information or related content.

One core feature is the ability to create reports and a dashboard for providing insights from all security related reports and policies.

Though this feature is great, it is not available in all tenants and does come with an associated cost. To learn more about Advanced Security Management you can visit the following articles.