Advanced Security Management (ASM) has been around for a while now, so I decided it’s time to take a deeper look at it. ASM is a stripped down version of the Cloud App Security suite, a recent acquisition of Microsoft’s. It allows you to monitor users’ activities in Office 365 as well as giving you insights on some “anomalous events”. Upon detecting such events, you can get alerted via email or text message and optionally, you can configure an additional “governance” action. At the moment, the only such action is blocking the user account in Office 365.
The review turned up a bit longer than expected, so it’s published in two parts here and here. In case you’re only interested in the short summary – it’s a nice looking feature with some marketing appeal, but the real value you get from it is questionable, especially considering the price. Other recently released features cover most of the ASM functionality, and with the APIs now opened it’s only a matter of time before ISVs integrate the toolset in their products, with more acceptable pricing.