The Benefits of Office 365 Migration

While there is no shortage of benefits of migrating to Microsoft 365, from cutting physical hardware and storage costs to reducing administrative duties and increasing collaboration, we will now take a deeper dive in exploring the specific benefits of hosted email services. In addition to the business class email services of Outlook, with synced contacts and calendars across phone and web applications and easy Active Directory integration, you also have the convenient options of document sharing directly within email messages, the increased security of various email encryption options, redundancy and low cost storage.

The Convenience of Modern Attachments

Rather than sifting through file explorer to find the latest document you need to attach to your outgoing email message, Outlook’s Modern Attachments feature allows you to attach recent files directly from your email message window. If however, you do need to do a bit of searching, in addition to browsing the files on your machine, you can easily browse web locations from which to add your attachment. The beauty of attaching a file from your One Drive account to your email, is that a cloud icon will appear next to your attachment, which indicates that because it’s stored online there are a number of additional options available to both the email sender and recipient. By default, email recipients will have permission to edit the cloud based documents, but the sender can simply change these permissions to only allow them to view. Additionally, if the sender would like the recipient to be able to make changes, but not to the version stored in One Drive, the sender has the option to simply attach a copy of the document.

Email Encryption and Security

Office 365 offers three types of email encryption to administrators to secure email. These include:

• Office Message Encryption (OME)
  • Built on Azure Rights Management, you can send encrypted email to people both in and outside of your organization, to any email address. Administrators can define rules for encryption conditions.
• Secure/Multipurpose Mail Extensions (S/MIME)
  • This is a certificate-based method of encryption that allows you to encrypt and digitally sign email. Only the intended recipient will be able to open the encrypted message and the digital signature allows email recipients to verify the authenticity of the sender.
• Information Rights Management (IRM)
  • This method of encryption allows administrators to restrict the usage of emails, protecting sensitive information from being printed, forwarded or copied.

In addition to these email encryption methods, Office 365 already encrypts server connections with Transport Layer Security by default. In this case, even if a transmission was intercepted by a malicious party, they wouldn’t be able to decipher it.

Not only can Outlook help you protect your email communication, but with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection automatically enables spam filtering and virus protection on inbound and outbound emails, with multi-layered filters and scanning engines. Users can also manage their own Spam settings and retrieve blocked emails.

Redundancy

Losing an on premise email servers can be disastrous and can be a huge set back, financially. Downtime means lost productivity but with Microsoft’s guarantee of 99.9% uptime, you don’t need to worry too much. Office 365 is hosted in globally distributed data centers with redundant network architecture, and provides continuous backup and recovery services, so your email data is always accessible.

Low Cost Storage

Users have either a 50 GB or unlimited mailbox size depending on the Office 365 mail package that’s purchased.

On top of the above benefits, with Office 365 built in tools, migrating from on premise email services to Office 365 is seamless. To explore migration options that will reduce operational and IT costs, minimize future costs and increase agility, contact Align’s professional services experts to learn more about adapting and managing your infrastructure.