McAfee unveils new Microsoft Teams encryption update
McAfee has today announced that its MVISION Cloud now supports encryption enhancements in Microsoft Teams, including encrypted webhooks and encrypted payloads.
The cybersecurity company says this lets employees use Teams as a collaboration platform, participate in conversations and calls and upload and share documents while ensuring customer data remains secure with encryption.
McAfee's update comes just over a month after Microsoft announced an overhaul to its Teams platform.
The enhancements in Teams and the announcement of this McAfee update means MVISION Cloud remains one of the only Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) that is Certified for Microsoft Teams, according to McAfee.
Microsoft has seen an unprecedented spike in Teams usage with more than 44 million daily users — a figure that has grown by 12 million in just seven days.
Those users generate over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams each day as employees work from home. Employers must not only educate their employees on digital security best practices but also give them the tools to combat online threats that may stem from remote work, says McAfee.
"Effective collaboration allows organisations to accelerate business," says McAfee senior vice president and general manager of Cloud Security Rajiv Gupta.
"However, it is critical to have the right guardrails in place to protect from accidental data leakage or misuse.
"McAfee MVISION Cloud provides these capabilities for Microsoft Teams, assuring that only the right data is shared with the appropriate internal and external parties," says Gupta.
"This helps protect corporate data and intellectual property, and meet governance, risk and compliance policies thus enabling effective and safe collaboration."
The solution for Teams leverages McAfee's Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) technology in a unified platform—offering a cloud-native solution for organisations to protect their data and defend against threats in the cloud.
Extends existing DLP policies to messages and files in all types of Teams channels, enforcing policies based on keywords, fingerprints, data identifiers, regular expressions and match highlighting for content and metadata.
Restricts messages or files posted in channels to specific users, including blocking the sharing of data to any external location.
Enables auditing of regulated data uploaded to Teams and remediates policy violations by coaching users, notifying administrators, quarantining, tombstoning, restoring and deleting user actions. End users can autonomously correct their actions thereby reducing the burden on IT security teams.
Empowers organisations to detect and prevent anomalous behaviour indicative of insider threats and compromised accounts; captures a complete record of all user activity in Teams and leverages machine learning to analyse activity across multiple heuristics to accurately detect threats.
Provides rich capabilities for forensics and investigations including an auto-generated, detailed audit trail of all user activity.
Helps secure multiple access modes, including browsers and native apps, and applies controls based on contextual factors, including user, device, data and location; blocks access from personal devices lacking adequate control over data.
"We're pleased to see McAfee's continued commitment to supporting and securing this ever-increasing demand," says Microsoft Teams partner director of program management for information protection Rushmi Malaviarachchi.
"McAfee MVISION Cloud integrates with Microsoft Teams APIs, ensuring our joint customers can enable their employees to drive productivity and collaboration with Teams in a secure and compliant way.
