How secure is Teams?… I get this question in almost every meeting. Let me try to answer this in less than 300,000 words…
Elevator Response: Teams is more secure than any other collaboration platform out there. It is designed to withstand constant attacks by foreign sponsored hacking groups, and its security is proven. Not only does Microsoft protect its software, but they also offer a security platform to other companies to use. This is now a $20 billion dollar business and it double over last year.
Let’s back this up!
Microsoft has over 3500 security experts working every day on security.
Microsoft has over 820,000 security customers that use Microsoft’s tools to protect their environments,
Microsoft prevents over 1290 password attacks every second.
Microsoft blocked over 37 billion suspicious emails every year.
Microsoft analysis over 65 trillion security signals every day.
Security is more than preventing attacks and verifying the right password, it’s about knowledge. Let’s say your grandma’s computer was hacked and she doesn’t know it. Now in addition to her emailing and banking, her computer is a remote-control robot for hackers to use to attack other networks. As her computer attacks, its digital hardware fingerprint is noted. Microsoft knows grandma’s computer is compromised and that if your member logs into your community with all the right info but its from her computer, your member is hacked, and Microsoft blocks the login.
Is your data 100% secure? No, nothing is 100%, but I’ll bet it’s more than 99.9 secure and that is better than you and a team of 10 world class security consultant can expect.
Teams and the Microsoft platform is as secure as you want it to be but what does that mean? Well, there is a tradeoff as we get more and more secure, we require the member to do more.
| Level | Require Users to… | Relative level of protection (estimate). 100 being perfect security and 0 being open to the world | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | Use standard Microsoft security authentication. | 99.9 | Standard email/password |
| Level 2 | Use Multi-factor(phone text number, Face ID, etc) Authentication. | 99.97 | Multi factor eliminates 95% of all hacks. Even if someone gets your password, they will need access to your mobile phone to login. |
| Level 3 | Require members to install authentication managers and anti-virus software on their computers. | 99.98 | We are approaching corporate and state government level security here. |
| Level 4 | Require all users to take security training and require background checks. | 99.99 | We are approaching military level security at this level. |
| Level 5 | Military – Accessed from Microsoft’s government cloud. | 99.999 | Very restrictive This is available to government and military. |
How do you protect your Teams data?
The best approach to Office 3565 security is to either, hire a security/ 365 consultant to set this up for you or… just accept the defaults. Microsoft defaults enforce a very secure environment. The Microsoft 365 environment has an entire security center build it. If you are a 365 admin you can simply Click here
Once your 365 environment is secure you can move to investigating more topics about Teams specific security:
Check out this video to get started.
Here is a search string that will bring you all the security related Teams Blog articles.
References:
Teams security articles and videos
Microsoft Security milestone(interesting read)
Article: 50 Identity And Access Security Stats You Should Know In 2023