While a new system of detecting malware, ransomware, and viruses is obviously objectively beneficial for a business, the employee monitoring tools could be seen as more of a gray area, and its one that Microsoft have run afoul of before. There’s no concrete release date for these tools – they’ve simply been announced as a general idea, so we may be hearing more about them down the road. The former isn’t just a way of tracking your employees’ activities. In theory, it’s supposed to be used to see if your employees are going somewhere (virtually, of course) that might pose some kind of risk to their company computer, like a shady website. The latter is a new machine learning algorithm that detects any kind of risky program or script that might jeopardize the company and its data. These two features would work in tandem to protect the business from any potentially risky malware or ransomware. Potential actions that can be identified and analysed include:
Files copied to personal cloud storageFiles printed to local or network devicesFiles transferred or copied to a network shareFiles copied to USB devices
From a similar approach, monitoring your employees’ behavior and making sure they aren’t going to harmful sites is also an easy call from a business decision. After all, most businesses already have restrictions in place when it comes to the sites their employees can and can’t visit. However, this is far more of a debate that the machine learning system. Employee tracking is a massive debate. Tracking the eyes of employees working from home was being floated throughout the pandemic, but it was met with uproar about the invasive nature of the software. While this isn’t quite as intrusive, tracking your employee’s internet activity can definitely be seen as an infringement on their personal space, even if that space is virtual. Even Microsoft itself has backed off from this space recently, having received backlash for its ‘productivity score’, revealed last year as a way of assigning employees a grade for how much work they were getting done. In a blog post in December, it scaled back original plans due to pressure from users: Firstly, anti-virus software will serve largely the same function as the Microsoft 365, detecting and eliminating any viruses found within the computer’s system, or blocking them from entry in the first place, monitoring downloads, emails and external devices to keep your hardware safe. Secondly, while these services don’t cover much of the same ground as Microsoft 365, password managers and VPNs are still a great idea to help make your device as secure as possible. Password managers help compile all your passwords in one secure location, helping to prevent leaks and password theft, while VPNs ensure that all your browsing is private and safe from any prying eyes.
