Microsoft EM+S (Enterprise Mobility & Security) – Updates for June 2017

Changes to EM+S announced by Microsoft during June 2017 include:

• New resources for Remote Desktop Services Disaster Recovery

• ‘Do not track’ in Azure Information Protection (preview)

• Azure Information Protection Status Update

New Resources for Remote Desktop Services Disaster Recovery

Microsoft’s new resource enables users to create a multi-data centre (operating from more than one geographical location) Remote Desktop Services (RDS) deployment for disaster recovery.

Haley Rowland, RDS Programme Manager comments,: “When you deploy Remote Desktop Services into your environment, it becomes a critical part of your infrastructure, particularly the apps and resources that you share with users. If the RDS deployment goes down due to anything from a network failure to a natural disaster, users can’t access those apps and resources, and your business is negatively impacted.”

Using multiple data centres in Azure in various locations geographically reduces security risk, as the respective regions going down at the same time is unlikely. Geo-redundant, multi-data centre RDS deployment of this type can mean businesses are able to survive even a potentially ruinous failure affecting a whole region.

Microsoft is also advising businesses to create their own disaster recovery solution using Azure Site Recovery, whereby a range of replication technologies are used to protect and failover virtual machines and apps.

 ‘Do Not Track’ - Azure Information Protection Feature (preview)

Resulting from feedback from users worried about privacy and compliance issues when using the document tracking feature, ‘Do not track’ enables businesses to define groups whose members’ document activities shouldn’t be tracked. However, those in a ‘Do not track’ group will still be able to track and revoke access to documents they have protected themselves.

Azure Information Protection Status Update

On 28 June the Azure Information Protection (AIP) team released their first monthly status update, and announced they will be adding the UserVoice platform as a forum for user feedback and feature requests to support future improvements and updates.

The Customer and Partner Engagement team have also given an undertaking to deliver greater visibility in to features and updates in development, and releasing preview versions where possible. 

Microsoft has also updated the documentation for AIP, including:

• An FAQ entry for AIP on ‘How do I configure a Mac computer to protect and track documents?

• How to configure a label for Rights Management protection

• Azure Information Protection client administrator guide.