Ask any law firm CIO or corporate legal department operations manager, and they'll tell you that the key to security is data—knowing where it is, what it is, and how it can be secured. And as Microsoft builds out its Office 365 suite of products for businesses and legal, these security and data governance concerns have become top of mind.

In response, last week, Microsoft introduced enhancements to Office 365's security and compliance capabilities, including two new offerings called Threat Intelligence and Advanced Data Governance.

Advanced Data Governance utilizes machine learning to aid customers in finding and retaining data, while also formalizing policies across an Office 365 ecosystem to aid in defensible deletion. The tool includes system alerts to identify data governance risks (such as “Unusual volume of file deletion”), the ability to create custom alerts by specifying alert matching conditions and threshold, and the ability to apply compliance controls to on-premises data through filtering and Office 365 migration.