Microsoft Announces New Activity Feeds at RSA; BetterCloud for Office 365 Expands to Offer Security and Compliance Tools

Earlier this month, we announced the public beta release of BetterCloud for Office 365, our newest product offering and the first solution of its kind for the Microsoft cloud platform. Our team worked quickly to launch a product that was not just viable, but valuable, too, and the incredible adoption we’ve seen over the past few weeks has been great validation.

Just this morning, at RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft made an important announcement of its own—the release of the Office 365 Management Activity API. We have already been collaborating with Microsoft during the API’s pre-release and are developing new functionality that we’re excited to showcase at Microsoft Ignite in two weeks, where we’ll present alongside the Microsoft team as part of a select group of partner ISVs.

“The release of the Office 365 Management Activity API Preview will allow partners and Office 365 customers to realize greater value from the suite of Microsoft products in cloud IT,” said Nagesh Pabbisetty, Partner Group Program Manager, Office 365 Information Protection, Microsoft.

And realizing greater value is exactly what we plan to do. In order to become the leading insights, management, and security solution for the Microsoft cloud platform, an API of this kind is critical to providing the hook into Office 365 that enables us to build functionality that fulfills the security piece of our vision.

So what are we building?

Leveraging Microsoft’s Management Activity API to Extend Security Solutions for Office 365

Today, the centerpiece of BetterCloud for Office 365 is the Domain Health and Insight Center, its intelligent monitoring and alerting dashboard. We chose to start there because of the feature’s popularity in BetterCloud for Google Apps, and also since it provides IT with complete visibility into activities across their entire tenant.

The Management Activity API will allow us to go deeper—to layer activities that may seem commonplace over the course of a normal workday, but can be symptomatic of malicious user intent when compared against and correlated with other actions.

For example, when an anomalous login raises a red flag, we will listen for further activities within the same timeframe—such as changes in document sharing and mass document exports—to draw conclusions and understand the entire sequence of events.

What This Means for the BetterCloud for Office 365 Beta

In our last post, we explained how we grew a Microsoft ISV within our formerly Google-only shop. And as a startup within a startup (as we fondly call it internally), our team is agile, but more importantly, hungry to get our hands on new technologies and see how we can create value for our customers.

Through Microsoft’s extension of the API pre-release, we’ve been able to keep our team’s momentum going and accelerate our product’s growth and its ability to solve our customers’ problems. So, to Microsoft and to our beta advisors—thank you, and stay tuned.