SPC14 – SharePoint Online – Build for the Enterprise

SharePoint Online is become more and more important. It is basically the main platform for Microsoft in the years to come. However, many enterprises have questions regarding data-storage, security and availability. This session by Simon Skaria covers these aspects.

Simon started with a small history of SharePoint Online, BPOS and Office365. He also mentioned the platform of the Sochi Olympics. These were run on Microsoft Dynamics and Office365. They had 250K responses per second and 2.1 million streamers at the moment of the ice-hockey final. Pretty impressive.

Simon showed a customer testimony video of a healthcare organization which has very specific requirements for compliancy and security. This customer (Advocate Healthcare) introduced Office365. Based on this video, several subjects were covered;

Enterprise reliability

Microsoft offers a 99.99% level of reliability. To give the enterprise an insight into the running of the platform, Microsoft offers an administration center which shows you the current status of the Office365 platform (or, at least, your tenant). This center is available cross-platform (any browser, any device).

Security

Security has many levels. Physical, network, identity, hottest, application and data. And these levels all have there own ways of tackling issues. For example: encrypting at REST level (data) or 2-factor authentication (identity).

One very impressive part of the presentation was the live feed from the Microsoft Security “warroom”. We got an insight into the processes Microsoft uses to monitor the security of Office365. They receive 1TB of log files each day…..

Boundless storage

Woh…..also introduced today Microsoft announced the storagelimit of 1TB per site-collection and boundless (yes, you read this correctly) storage. Impressive.

Information protection

A new introduction during this session was Fort Knox. What this does, is to encrypt each part of a shredded blob. SharePoint 2013 introduced shredded storage, which enhanced the storage of blobs. Fort Knox enhances this.

Also important: Office 365 complies with all the required certifications worldwide. If this is not enough, Microsoft offers to set-up a dedicated datacenter (which they have done for China).

The sharing of information is also enhanced. When selecting the “Share” option, you now get the “require sign-in” option. The administrator of the Office365 tenant now has a Sharing option, in which you can configure sharing options.

Continuous innovation

Say bye-bye to the three year update cycle of SharePoint. Office365 now introduces continuous innovation. Changes are basically continuous, where Microsoft closely monitors how these changes are received. If these changes need to be modified, then Microsoft will modify them.

Just last week, SharePoint 2013 SP1 was released. This is off course the on-premise variant, but now includes the Office365 option in Central Administration. This allows you to configure the connection to the Office365 Yammer, Onedrive for business and Sites environment.