Microsoft previews Application Guard for Office
- Date: 13 October, 2020
Microsoft is edging closer to protecting organisations from Office users who inadvertently open risky attachments and cause malware outbreaks with the release of a public preview of Application Guard for Office.
Microsoft Office is so widely used that it is inevitably targeted for malicious reasons. However, the Application Guard security technology is poised to offer a solution for users of Word, Excel and PowerPoint as it moves towards general availability.
Originally, this defensive technology was only available for the Edge browser, but the new Application Guard for Office is set to provide enhanced security capabilities to the wider Office productivity tools.
The key to Application Guard for Office is that it opens files from potentially unsafe locations in a secure container. Such files might be documents obtained from internet or intranet domains that have not been marked as trusted, files from potentially unsafe areas and attachments received via Outlook.
Taking advantage of Hyper-V technology, these files can be opened in a virtualised environment, so even if they do contain malicious code, they are sandboxed from the system and are therefore unable to cause any damage.
Unlike the much older Protected View, another Office defensive feature, which opens potentially dangerous documents as read-only, the files opened in Application Guard can be printed, edited and saved. When saved, however, they remain in the isolation container and when reopened later, are again quarantined in that sandbox.
End users get a warning pop-up box when documents get opened using Application Guard for Office. An opened document will show another pop-up notice in the ribbon menu, and there will be a shield icon displayed in the taskbar. If users trust the source, it will still be possible for them to remove the Application Guard for Office protection on a document.
It’s also possible to set certain policies for Application Guard for Office, such as disabling copy-and-paste actions, restricting printing and turning off application access to a device’s microphone and camera.
Application Guard for Office is initially aimed at top-tier Microsoft 365 E5 plan subscribers, with the licencing requirements for general release of the product being specified as ‘Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 Security’.
