Nucleus Cyber, an archTIS company (ASX:AR9) and provider of advanced information protection solutions, announced today the latest release of NC Protect to simplify security for Microsoft Teams to ensure secure collaboration as teams and channels are provisioned by users. The latest release empowers team owners to apply security using default rule sets to prevent accidental sharing, data loss and misuse, as well as enable secure guest access and sharing.
Microsoft Teams has seen viral growth during the pandemic, with over 115 million daily active users to date and growing. The platform’s ability to allow users to quickly share information via built-in chat and file sharing capabilities has rapidly made it a key collaboration app for organisations. However, the speed and simplicity it affords regular users to create new teams and channels for collaboration presents a challenge for IT and security groups tasked with ensuring business-critical information is properly protected.
“User managed tools like Microsoft Teams make it difficult to keep track of data and ensure that an organisation’s information security, sharing and usage policies are being followed as new teams and channels can quickly be spun up by users, not IT,” said Kurt Mueffelmann, Global COO of Nucleus Cyber and archTIS. “With that in mind, we set out to make it easy for NC Protect users to secure new teams and channels using default security policies without involving IT. NC Protect now includes built-in default rule sets, which allow team owners to set security from within the Microsoft Teams app itself with just a few clicks, without any IT knowledge or skills to ensure internal and external users can collaborate securely.”
Key capabilities of the new NC Protect default rule sets for Microsoft Teams include:
- Integration with the Microsoft Teams UI enables a team’s owner to easily select and apply default information protection rule sets to the team or channel right from the NC Protect tab in the Microsoft Teams app to ensure secure collaboration as teams are provisioned by users.
- Information protection – Select from default policies to control access to content and add additional protection to documents, including:
- Forced viewing of sensitive information in a read only secure Web reader;
- Automatic application of digital watermarks with the user’s name and date, encrypt documents in motion; and/or
- Restrict document functions such as print, copy/paste and save as.
- Channel security – Control whether a channel inherits the security policies from the team, or its policies are set individually.
- Guest access – Control guest access to a team or channel and apply additional security features, such as forced viewing of sensitive information in a read only secure Web reader and watermarks.
- Privacy settings – Apply additional privacy controls to a team or channel to control access.
- ‘Public’ uses permissions native to Teams.
- ‘Private’ to select a subset of team users to be allowed into the channel.
- ‘Archived’ to force all documents to be opened read only in the secure reader with a personalised watermark (current date and username), useful for inactive projects that need to be referenced for historical purposes.
- Ability to customise default rule sets – The out-of-the-box default rule sets can be easily customised to meet an organisation’s individual security needs and policies.
The new NC Protect Tab in Microsoft Teams enables a team’s owner to easily select and apply default information protection rule sets to the team or channel right from the Teams’ UI.
The latest release of NC Protect, which includes the default rule sets, is now available to customers to safeguard business-critical information in Microsoft Teams and supports information protection in other Microsoft Office 365 apps, including SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Exchange and Yammer.
