Security, Compliance & Organizational Intelligence for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a business communication tool that enables employees to break down business silos and communicate faster and more effectively with their colleagues. Teams was initially released in 2017, and as of 2022 it had 270 million daily active users. Microsoft Teams is part of the Microsoft 365 family of apps.

Teams provides end users with several different types of chat and messaging features. Chats can be one-on-one or involve groups of users. Each user can also use their personal chat channel messages to set reminders or save information. These chats are all visible to anybody involved in them but are not visible to other users. Chats also appear in Channels under the Posts tab. These are visible to everyone who has access to that Channel. Whether a chat is private or not, businesses can exercise control over all messages in their Microsoft Teams environment and may do so to ensure regulatory compliance and acceptable use or to fulfill legal and other business needs.

Users are able to edit or delete their sent messages in Microsoft Teams. However, other members of the chat will see a notification that a message was changed or removed. Users can also delete one-to-one, group and meeting chats from their Teams dashboard. This will only remove the chat from that user’s Teams menu. The chat and full message history will remain visible to other participants. Company administrators can change these settings for their Teams environment and even when users are able to delete all their content, a record of what it contained may still exist to fulfill retention and other policies.

Microsoft Teams uses industry standard security to protect data-in-place, including Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Mutual Transport Layer Security (MTLS) to secure instant messages and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) to protect media traffic. Teams also supports end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on an opt-in basis that must be set up by a company administrator.

Teams is available as an app on all major operating systems, including iOS and Android. However, users can join in Teams chats via SMS message. Text message users can receive up to 1000 messages from each group chat, although some rich media content will not be delivered.

Users can invite people from outside their organization into their Teams workspace unless Guest Access has been deactivated by the company administrator. To join a Teams chat, external users must have or create a Teams or Skype profile.

Microsoft Teams uses some Artificial Intelligence (AI) enhancements to improve user experience. Some examples include automatic echo cancellation and background noise suppression in Teams video meetings. ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence chatbot created by OpenAI, based on the GTP-3 language model. In partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft has integrated some features of ChatGPT into its Teams Premium tool. These features include creating automated meeting minutes and intelligent recaps, notes and follow-up actions.

Teams is available for the US Government Cloud Community (GCC) and meets all required security and compliance standards for data protection, including FedRAMP, DoD IL2 and ITAR.

Microsoft Teams offers a Slack integration that enables Teams calls directly from the Slack app. Users can join or initiate Teams calls by connecting their Slack account with their Office 365 account and installing the Teams integration app.

Microsoft enterprise users can improve their security and risk posture across Microsoft software and apps using E3 or E5 licenses. An E3 license includes Microsoft 365 apps, Outlook email and calendar, SharePoint, Yammer, OneDrive for Business and more, supported by security, compliance and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) functionality from Azure, BitLocker and Compliance Center. E5 licenses contain everything included in E3, plus advanced threat protection, information security and compliance features. Aware offers DLP policies, advanced eDiscovery tools and insider threat detection for Microsoft Teams supported by comprehensive audit logs, plus advanced organizational intelligence insights from digital messages at scale. In addition to Teams, Aware supports all major collaboration tools, including Slack, Zoom, Webex by Cisco and Workplace from Meta.

By default, Microsoft Teams data is set to store for seven years. Workspace administrators can set new retention policies, up to retaining data indefinitely, or delete data from Teams.

Aware helps organizations detect sensitive data sharing in Microsoft Teams using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workflows that automatically ingest Teams data and analyze it in real time against a growing library of regular expressions and keywords. Aware administrators can configure workflows to suit their company’s specific requirements to increase results relevance and reduce false positives.

Aware provides risk intelligence and organizational insights for all major collaboration tools, including Slack, Zoom, Webex and Workplace from Meta. Aware ingests data from all tools into a single, centralized platform for efficient data management and universal control across the digital ecosystem.

Aware uses industry-leading Natural Language Processing (NLP) trained on millions of real collaboration messages to surface the subjects that matter most to employees. Intelligent sentiment-scoring normalized for individual organizations provides enhanced context into how different subjects affect employee experience. With these insights, business leaders can make more informed decisions and respond in real time to changes in sentiment across the organization. Aware also provides advance notice when negativity begins to spread, giving businesses the opportunity to react before toxicity takes hold.