In this post I give you an architectural overview on thoughts, ideas and options to a more secure communication and collaboration experience with Microsoft Teams.

It’s inevitable to provide a secure, modern and usable (!) solution for your users, your company and keep identities and [information] assets secure. I want to emphasize usable because you can surely set up a highly secure service, however, if you do so, nobody might be able to use it because you locked it too restrictively. So, this will probably cause other headaches, first of all users need to get work done and might workaround that highly secured service [just using anything else which they find online]. No adoption. Hence, the added value of the communication and collaboration solution and the ROI will never be achieved. That’s why you need to figure out a suited balance between security and collaboration.

Microsoft Teams as part of the Microsoft 365 cloud services can leverage these comprehensive security features to enable a secured communication and collaboration. Besides the fact that Microsoft encrypts data in transit as well as at rest.

The following slides contain what you could do to secure your Microsoft Teams communication and collaboration experience by not giving up usability and a modern teamwork experience.

Beyond these basic security considerations in the slides you could, of course , also make further and more granular optimizations, for example …

• in the Microsoft Office 365 Admin Center
• in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center
• in the Microsoft SharePoint Online Admin Center
• in the Microsoft One Drive for Business Admin Center
• in the Microsoft Exchange Online Admin Center
• as well as in other Microsoft Admin Centers

as needed.

Conclusion, opinion and summary

Microsoft 365 enables you to secure Microsoft Teams and Office 365 with the eligible licenses. There are many aspects around securing your modern teamwork experience. It starts with general identity and information protection and goes ahead with fine tuning Microsoft Office 365, Teams, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Yammer etc. There are some bigger and some smaller switches to be aware of and to configure modern teamwork secure. E.g. guest access, external access (federation), message policies, meeting/conferencing policies, app setup policies, app permission policies and many more. At least but not at last you also should think about monitoring and auditing so that you’ll be able to trace things in case it is required.

Additional resources

• Microsoft Teams Essentials for IT | Security and Compliance
• Overview of security and compliance in Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Teams Security and Compliance
• Detect workplace harassment and respond – Communication Compliance in Microsoft 365
• Location of data in Microsoft Teams
• Introducing Conditional Access for the Office 365 suite!
• Microsoft Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
• Microsoft Cloud App Security
• Auditor Reports (Service Trust Portal)
• Microsoft Cloud Architecture Security Download
• Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architecture