OneDrive Grows Up, Gains Enterprise Security

Personal Governance

Governance is not just about how your systems and services are managed and administrated, it is also about how the information held within your services is used, controlled and stored.

In an announcement this week (June 25th, 2019) Microsoft has launched a needle shifting piece of functionality to its OneDrive consumer product.

‘OneDrive Personal Vault’ brings Enterprise grade security to a specified portion of your OneDrive storage both in the cloud and on-device.

Watch Out Competitors!

In a move clearly designed to fire a shot across the bows of other providers (Box, iCloud, Amazon, etc.) OneDrive Personal Vault provides strong authentication (strong authentication usually refers to a secondary method of authentication that is not invoked until access to data is required as opposed to two-factor or multi-factor that is invoked at the point of login to a service) via a number of selectable methods coupled to enhanced encryption at rest on Windows 10 devices (to be fair, mostly the on-device change is the shift here as data in the Microsoft Cloud is already encrypted) utilising Bitlocker technology.

Interestingly for Android and IOS devices Microsoft will not be adding a layer of at-rest encryption, instead opting to ‘recommend’ that the devices are encrypted using other methods.

Pin and Chips

Improving on the concept, Personal Vault also introduces automatic locking of the vault after user definable periods of inactivity, a useful feature made possible by the use of strong auth as opposed to TFA or MFA.

Rolling out to all users of OneDrive by the end of 2019, this update further reaffirms Microsoft’s commitment to providing seamless, secure experiences regardless of who you are in the customer world – even if you make use of the totally free 5GB allocation given to you simply for having a no-cost Microsoft account.

All up, this is an interesting, but welcome, move by Microsoft. It will be interesting to see what comes next for the much loved (!) OneDrive.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

[This post originally appeared on the personal blog our CEO, Seb Matthews: http://sebmatthews.net]