News

Microsoft's Advanced Threat Protection Service for E-Mail Goes Live

• By Kurt Mackie
• 06/08/2015

Exchange Online e-mail security feature Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is now live.

The finalized service is now available for Office 365 commercial and "government pricing" customers, Microsoft announced this week. The ATP solution will be available to nonprofit, education and "government community cloud" Office 365 tenants "at a later date."

ATP extends the protections of Microsoft's Exchange Online Protection service, which provides spam and malware protections for $1 per user per month. The ATP solution has three components. It has a "safe attachment" feature, a malicious URL protection feature to screen e-mail links and a tracing capability.

Organizations can investigate blocked messages with the tracing capability. They can also track any malicious links that end users may click.

The ATP service can be used with the Exchange Online service or with premises-based Exchange Server implementations. However, using ATP with premises-based servers also requires having Exchange Online Protection turned on for "inbound email filtering," according to a Microsoft FAQ.

Microsoft charges $2 per user per month for the ATP service, with government pricing at $1.75 per user per month.