Announcing Customer Lockbox for Office 365

As a provider of cloud services, we recognize that organizations understandably want to have full control over access to their content stored on cloud services. Today at RSA, announced Lockbox client for Office 365, a new capability designed to provide customers with unprecedented control over their content on the service. Lockbox client offers customers explicit control in rare cases when a Microsoft engineer may need access to the contents of the client to solve a customer's problem.

In our efforts to maximize data security and privacy for Office 365 customers, we designed the service to require almost zero interaction with customer content for Microsoft employees. Almost all service operations performed by Microsoft are fully automated and human involvement is highly controlled and an abstraction of the contents of customers. As a result, only rarely, such as when solving a customer problem with voice or documents contained not a Microsoft engineer has no reason to access the contents of the client in Office 365 cases.

Microsoft engineers are not entitled access to any service. All access through a rigorous control technology called Lockbox access is obtained. Today, Lockbox applies access control across multiple levels of approval within Microsoft that provides fair access to time limited authorization and time-bound. In addition, all access control activities in service are recorded and audited.

With today's announcement, we are bringing to customers in the approval process Lockbox for cases involving access to customer content. Using client Lockbox function ensures that the Microsoft engineer does not get access to the contents of customers without the explicit approval of the client. When the client receives the request for access, they can review the request and approve or reject. Until the application is approved, the engineer of Microsoft Access will be granted.

This post was written by Vijay Kumar, senior director of product marketing, and Raji Dani, director of the main program for the team of the Office 365 Security.

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