Report: Microsoft Leads in Cloud Collaboration - Is Sensitive Data Secure?

In Microsoft's ideal world, Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics would be two halves of a whole; in fact, the company now groups Dynamics CRM and ERP with commercial and consumer versions of Office and Office 365 into one financial reporting entity with the "married name" Productivity and Business Processes.

But does Office 365 with its collaboration platform bring security "baggage" to the relationship?

Skyhigh Networks, maker of an enterprise cloud security platform, has just released its sobering Cloud Adoption & Risk Report Q4 2015, compiled from cloud usage data for over 23 million users worldwide. Some of the findings are very positive for Office 365 and Microsoft, among them:

• Microsoft Office 365 is the most popular collaboration service (rated by active users), followed by Gmail and Cisco WebEx.
• Of the top 20 enterprise cloud services, Office 365 takes the #1 spot, followed by Salesforce and Cisco Webex, Concur and Yammer.
• Windows desktop users access 77.7% more cloud services than the average Mac desktop user and upload 3,056 MB of data in the cloud, more than any other device.

Now, the dark side: Skyhigh found that in Q3 2015, fully 15.8% of all documents uploaded to cloud-based file sharing services contained sensitive information and the majority of these files, 58.4%, are Microsoft Office documents. Some real-world examples are Excel spreadsheets of employee data like social security numbers; PowerPoint files with information on competitors; local database files from programs like Microsoft Access with employee salaries; and draft press releases that could be used for insider trading. After Office documents, Adobe PDF files were second most commonly ...