Six Ways to Safeguard Your Company's Data with Office 365

In today’s hyper-connected world, small businesses need all the help they can get when it comes to protecting their data. Fortunately, they have a pair of powerful allies: Microsoft Office 365 and Fanatical Support from Rackspace.

Here are six principle ways that Office 365 and Fanatical Support have protected the confidential or proprietary data of countless small businesses like yours.

1. Safeguarding your email 

Office 365’s anti-spam protection helps prevent phishing emails and spam from landing in your employees’ inboxes. Expert filtering is pre-configured at setup with advanced filtering available by sender, IP address, region, language, content and more. Also, email encryption is available with select Office 365 plans, so your electronic communications are protected while in transit and at rest.

2. Preventing data loss or theft

Unfortunately, employees frequently resort to using a public file-hosting service or their personal email account to send large attachments to themselves, other employees or vendors, because their company email system won’t permit them to send bulky attachments. Office 365 helps mitigate this security risk with OneDrive, its web-based storage service. Your employees can simply deposit any too-large-to-email files in OneDrive, where they’re safely protected but easily accessed from multiple devices, even by people who don’t have a Microsoft account.

3. Managing access rights

With specific Office 365 plans you can tightly control the flow of information in your company. These plans enable you to set rules, such as which employees or departments can access a document or folder. They also let you prevent documents or emails with specified words from being emailed, saved or printed. This is particularly useful in preventing employees from accidentally sending emails or attachments that contain information such as Social Security or credit card numbers. Other software programs notify an admin only after such an event occurs. Not Office 365, though — it prevents the data breach from ever happening in the first place. Additional Office 365 security features allow you to restrict actions such as saving, forwarding and printing by user or group. This also helps prevent the intentional or unintentional loss of data.

4. Enabling security settings

The Microsoft Office 365 control panel offers access to security features like email encryption and user rights management, but setting up these tools correctly can be a challenge. Rackspace Office 365 specialists can quickly show you how to enable your security settings and also save you a lot of time by using the Rackspace control panel to configure your company’s encryption settings with a few clicks. We have years of experience supporting email and productivity tools and have used this knowledge to build Fanatical Support tools directly into our control panel.

5. Archiving and retaining data

Many companies need to retain documents and emails for legal or compliance reasons. Office 365 lets you set retention and preservation policies for all of your documents and emails, thereby helping your business comply with industry regulations by saving files across your selected mailboxes and folders. Likewise, Rackspace Email Archiving enables your company to easily locate critical emails when you most need them, like during an audit, discovery request or during employee turnover. And perhaps most helpful, it includes unlimited retention periods and unlimited storage.

6. Getting around-the-clock support

As powerful as Office 365 is, small businesses can benefit greatly by enlisting the help of Rackspace’s Fanatical Support, which is available 24x7x365. There will likely be questions that arise when setting up new features, security threats are publicized, new employees join the company or company objectives shift. That’s where Rackers can shine by giving you their decades of experience in one call, chat or ticket.