Category: Windows 11

The best way to protect a business of any size today against cyber risks is with an integrated suite of tools. Microsoft 365 Defender is one such service that we’ll look at in this article.

For many years the conventional wisdom, especially in larger organizations, was to buy best of breed solutions for each area. So, you ended up with the “best” (defining the “best” solution is hard, and changes quite quickly) email hygiene solution, the best anti-malware solution, the best firewall etc. And because none of them natively integrated with each other, and manual integration is hard and time-consuming, you ended up with multiple consoles and multiple data silos where low fidelity signals were ignored, while they could actually have told you about a breach in progress if you’d been able to correlate those individual low severity signals between each of the systems. A way to solve this issue is via Security Orchestration and Automation Response (SOAR) solutions that act as a “glue” between each product. Another is to buy an already integrated suite of tools such as Microsoft 365 Defender. The promise is eXtended Detection and Response (XDR), which is an extension of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to indicate that not only endpoints but all systems are included in the protection and response.

Microsoft 365 Defender Main Dashboard

Name changes

In late 2020, Microsoft changed the names of nearly all of their security products so if you’re used to hearing about Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) or Microsoft Threat Protection (MTP), those have all been replaced. There’s now Microsoft 365 Defender which is the umbrella term for the Defenders in M365, as well as a unified console. There’s also Microsoft Defender for Identity (formerly Azure ATP), Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (formerly Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection), Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Windows Defender, then Microsoft Defender).

These products all tie into Microsoft 365 Defender (M365D) and are commonly abbreviated MDI, MDO and MDE. Microsoft’s Cloud App Security Broker (CASB) was renamed to Defender for Cloud Apps (MDCA?) at the Ignite conference in November 2021, it was previously known as Cloud App Security (MCAS). This makes a whole lot of sense as it’s part of the Defender family and can feed logs into the unified console.

Whilst not strictly a security product, and not bearing the Defender moniker, Azure Active Directory (AAD) and its security features also tie strongly into Microsoft 365 Defender.

There’s also Azure Defender for your IaaS and PaaS workloads in Azure, which also changed its name at Ignite in November 2021 to Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Also, separate from all of these security products but eminently capable of working with all of them is Azure Sentinel – a cloud-based Security Information and Event Management (SIEM).

Meet the Defenders

We have deep-dive articles on MDI, MDO and MDE here in the M365 Dojo but understanding what each of them does is crucial to understanding how Microsoft 365 Defender ties them all together.

MDI is a cloud-based service that monitors your on-premises Active Directory for specific indicators of compromised identities and attacker operations. Anytime an attacker gains a foothold in your organization, one of their first goals is to move laterally and elevate privileges, preferably reaching Domain Dominance. This last stage, where your entire on-premises identity infrastructure is completely under the criminal’s control, takes on average 48 hours. MDI relies on agents on your Domain Controllers (DCs) or if your security team can’t stomach that, a member server that receives forwarded event log data from each DC and catches network traffic using port mirroring. MDI will catch attacker activity during five phases: Reconnaissance, Compromised credentials, Lateral movement, Domain dominance and Exfiltration. Because MDI is laser-focused on AD (and AD Federation Services ADFS, after the Solarwinds attacks), it produces high fidelity alerts with very specific data to catch and contain miscreants on your network. Examples of attacks detected include Account enumeration reconnaissance, AS-REP Roasting, Identity theft (pass-the-hash), Skeleton Key attack and Data exfiltration over SMB and many, many others.

MDO is all about providing advanced protection for your Office Online workloads. So, after incoming emails and attachments have been scanned by Exchange Online Protection (EOP) which includes three AV engines to provide a base level of protection if an attachment has never been seen before it’ll be opened in a VM and automatically inspected for malicious behaviour to catch zero-day attacks. MDO also looks at every URL in emails to see if they lead to compromised sites. It also provides time-of-click scanning as attackers will frequently compromise a benign website, send out their emails with links that won’t raise flags as they’re delivered (since the site isn’t displaying malicious indications at this point), then activate the malicious payload on the website. By checking the link atthe time of actually clicking on it, MDO provides stronger protection for your end-users. MDO comes in two flavours, plan 1 covers the above features, whereas plan 2 adds Threat Trackers (intelligence on current attacks in the wild), Threat Explorer (also known as Explorer, shows you recent threats in your tenant), Automated Investigation and Response (AIR) and Attack simulation training (to train your users to recognize dangerous phishing emails).

MDE on the other hand is a full-fledged EDR and anti-malware solution for your endpoints, including Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS and Linux. On Windows there’s no agent to deploy, it’s simply a matter of activating the bits already in the OS through onboarding, either with a script or Configuration Manager, Intune, or Group Policy at scale. Apart from local and cloud-based Machine Learning (ML) models to identify new threats, MDE also offers AIR and a complete Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) solution.

Threat and Vulnerability Management dashboard

TVM inventories all software installed on your endpoints (Windows 8.1, 10 (1709+), 11 and Windows Server 2008R2+, MacOS and Linux) and compares against known software vulnerabilities. Using signals such as the risk of the vulnerability being exploited, the number of devices in your organization where it’s installed and the usage of the application it’ll give you a prioritized list of programs to upgrade. As this is often a task for the endpoint/desktop team rather than the security team, there’s built-in functionality to create a task in Intune with links to the relevant upgrades etc.

Until recently there was only one version of MDE, but in August 2021 Microsoft announced a new version called Plan 1, while the full-featured version became Plan 2. Plan 1 is in preview and brings Next-generation protection (anti-malware/virus), Attack surface reduction, Manual response actions, Centralized management, Security reports and API access. Plan 2 adds Device discovery, TVM as above, AIR, Advanced hunting, full EDR and Microsoft Threat Experts (MTE). This last one is a managed SOC service by Microsoft which gives you two services, targeted attack notifications where analysts have identified an ongoing attack in your environment and access to experts on-demand to help your SOC if you need them.

At the Ignite 2021 conference, these two siblings (Plan 1 & Plan 2) were joined by a cousin, Microsoft Defender for Business which will (it’s “coming to preview soon”) protect your Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android endpoints for up to 300 users in a business. Unlike Plan 1, it comes with TVM, and AIR and full EDR so the only things that are missing are Linux support, MTE and advanced hunting. It’ll be available as part of Microsoft 365 Business Premium or as a standalone license at $3 per user per month. It’ll also integrate with Microsoft 365 Lighthouse.

A common misunderstanding is between MDE and the built-in security features that every Windows 10 user can take advantage of Microsoft Defender Security Center and Microsoft Defender Antivirus. These basic protection features are used by MDE, but it adds many advanced features on top as outlined above.

There are good alternatives to Microsoft’s services, if you’re looking for email hygiene, archiving / journaling, zero-day protection and email continuity even if Exchange Online is unavailable, plus optional backup, 365 Total Protection is excellent.

Microsoft 365 Defender

MDE used to have its own portal, separate from other security products (securitycenter.windows.com) and while it’s still there it comes with a banner strongly suggesting redirecting users to the main M365 Defender portal (security.microsoft.com). MDI’s previous portal is completely retired and its functionality was moved into the Defender for Cloud Apps portal quite some time ago and MDO is already housed in the M365 Defender portal. The work to integrate MDI into the main Microsoft 365 Defender portal is extensive and is likely to take some time. There’s more to the integration than just a single portal, although that’s a good start.

If you are using MCAS, you can integrate its telemetry into Microsoft 365 Defender.

First, there’s a unified alerts queue, so you’re not looking in one place for an email threat that might have snuck past your mail filtering, and in another place for endpoints where that same email attachment might have been opened, it’s all in the same place. The same goes for the unified user page, a user account is an object in MDI (AD) but also an entity in MDO (has a mailbox, OneDrive for Business storage etc.) and of course an object in MDE on whatever devices they’re logged in to.

The unified investigation page is my favourite, the ability to see details of automated actions (AIR) along with options to further investigate myself is very powerful, especially as it spans all the different Defenders. By popular demand, there’s also an email entity page that lets you investigate suspicious emails, including previewing them if they’re stored in an Exchange online mailbox.

Email entity page

There are two ways of controlling access to M365 Defender data using RBAC, either using built-in Azure AD roles or if you want to control access very granularly in a large environment, using Custom role access.

You don’t need to have all the different Defenders enabled to take advantage of M365 Defender, as soon as you enable one workload it works, as you add more services, more of the portal will light up.

Do you like to Hunt?

The coolest benefit of the integration however is the ability to do advanced hunting across all the data flowing into Microsoft 365 Defender. This is a sign of a mature security organization where it’s not all about dealing with alerts and incidents raised by the security systems but where there’s also time for an analyst to say, “I wonder if that attack against a company similar to us last week could have hit us too – let me grab the Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and look through our logs”. All Microsoft security products rely on Kusto Query Language (KQL) with a similar syntax to SQL for searching through large amounts of security log data and the ability to look in one query over email data (MDO), identity data (MDI), endpoint processes and actions (MDE) as well as third party cloud service logs (MCAS) is incredibly powerful.

There’s a new Advanced Hunting UI, recently released, which offers tabs for each query you’re working with and feedback on the performance of each query run.

Here I’m looking to see if any suspicious PowerShell activity was launched within 30 minutes of a known malicious email being received in the last 7 days.

Advanced Hunting in Microsoft 365 Defender

If you find events of interest during hunting, you can now use them to create an incident or add them as alerts to an existing incident. You can also bring in external data into hunting queries from lists of IP addresses, accounts etc.

Microsoft 365 Defender also offers a Secure Score across identities, devices and apps, giving you an overview of where you have strong controls in place and areas where you can improve your tenant’s overall security posture.

Microsoft 365 Defender Secure Score

There’s also a unified view of Alerts and Incidents, actions taken by AIR and reports for endpoints, emails, identity, and overall security.

Alternative Solutions

While Microsoft 365 Defender is a comprehensive security solution it’s not the only game in town. There are many other providers that offer various solutions for email hygiene that integrate neatly with Exchange Online and provide features Microsoft doesn’t. There are also services for email continuity (when Exchange Online is down), encryption of sensitive data, long term archiving of emails for compliance, signature services, backup of Office 365 data and many other EDR and XDR solutions on the market. One reason for choosing a different provider is the perceived conflict of interest when Microsoft is both providing the collaboration platform and the security services on top. Another reason could be to pick a best of breed solution for a particular threat – just make sure the integration to the rest of the security stack you need is available.

Conclusion

The power of an integrated suite that looks for malicious activity across email, identity and endpoints cannot be underestimated. There are a few things to keep in mind, however: Microsoft 365 Defender is focused on Microsoft 365 (it’s in the name) but most organizations have many other platforms and services to secure and monitor which is where a SIEM like Azure Sentinel comes into play. It can ingest data from Microsoft 365 Defender and many other Microsoft services, along with 100+ third-party data sources for a true single view of your digital estate. There’s also bi-directional synchronization between them so if you close an incident in Microsoft 365 Defender, it closes in Azure Sentinel and vice versa. Log retention is only 30 days in Microsoft 365 Defender whereas Azure Sentinel gives you 90 days for free, with several different options for storing security log data for longer.

Secondly, most features in the Defender family require Microsoft 365 E5 licensing (or M365 E3 plus add-ons) which isn’t cheap, especially in medium to large organizations. There’s definitely a conversation to be had about the role of Microsoft providing the platforms and then charging extra on top for the advanced security features, rather than just ensuring that the platform itself has the required security in place. An alternative is a trusted third-party solution such as Hornet Security’s 365 Total Protection which is also considerably more cost-effective.

Source :
https://www.altaro.com/microsoft-365/deep-dive-m365-defender/

This article focuses on administration and management exclusively for OneDrive for Business. We will cover advice and best practices from my extensive experience working with service ideal for system admins and those actively working with it on a daily basis.

What is Microsoft OneDrive?

Microsoft has two different, but similar services called OneDrive, both of which offer cloud file storage for users. A free version of OneDrive is available to everyone and is often called the “consumer” version. The business version is “OneDrive for Business” and requires a subscription to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. Both look a lot alike but are managed very differently. To add to the mix, Microsoft often refers to OneDrive for Business as simply “OneDrive” in their documentation and even in the UI.
Note: I may refer to OneDrive instead of OneDrive for Business from time to time in this article for the sake of brevity, but I always mean OneDrive for Business unless otherwise stated.

OneDrive for Business has company-wide administration in mind. A service administrator can control the deployment of the synchronization app, network performance, and many other settings. With OneDrive (consumer), there is no management framework. The individual using the service controls their settings.

Where Should Users Save Files?

OneDrive for Business makes it very easy to share files with others, but if you find yourself sharing lots of files, it is recommended to use Teams or SharePoint instead. Teams and SharePoint are simply better for collaboration. For example, with OneDrive, you can’t check-in and check-out a document. Also, in Teams, any document you upload to Teams is available to the entire Team by default, whereas documents you upload to OneDrive are private by default. Also, in Teams, a conversation about a document is shared in a Teams channel rather than via email. The general guidance is if you are working on a file without others involved use OneDrive for Business. If you need others involved, use a more collaborative service – Teams or SharePoint.

OneDrive for Business uses SharePoint Online as Service

As the service administrator, one of the most important concepts to master is that OneDrive for Business is a special purpose SharePoint document library created automatically for every user in your company. When a user is assigned an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 license, the services automatically create a personal OneDrive for Business document library.

The URL for OneDrive for Business is formatted as follows:

https://<company base name>-my.sharpoint.com/personal/<user-id>

The landing page (shown above) for OneDrive for Business shows “My Files” which are your files. You can also navigate from here to any SharePoint asset, including SharePoint Document Libraries, files hosted for Teams, or other SharePoint content.

Now that you know OneDrive for Business is using SharePoint under the hood, the following guidance makes sense:

To manage the OneDrive sharing settings for your organization, use the Sharing page of the new SharePoint admin center, instead of the Sharing page in the OneDrive admin center. It lets you manage all the settings and latest features in one place.

In this way, settings related to file sharing on SharePoint are aligned with those for OneDrive for Business (and Teams, which also uses SharePoint as a file store). OneDrive picks up many features from SharePoint, such as the ability to do File Restores, Restore a previous version of file, and synchronize files to your desktop.

Easy Anonymous Access

One main reason OneDrive for Business is well-liked is that it’s so easy to share a document with anyone. You can send someone a URL to a document and relax. It just works, and you won’t hear the dreaded “I can’t open the document” (which is all too common and a huge productivity sink).

The screenshot below exemplifies my point. What’s being shown is the side-by-side sharing experience in Teams vs. OneDrive. Take note! There is no Share option in Teams. You can copy the link to the file, but you must know if the user you send it to has rights to view the document in the Teams library. In OneDrive for Business, however, there is a Share option that allows you to send a URL to anyone. This is called Anonymous Access and is one of the primary reasons users share from OneDrive rather than Teams.

Also, in OneDrive, if you click on Anyone with the link can edit, you can further refine the Sharing options.

As a side note, users frustrated by Teams’ lack of sharing controls can easily open a document or folder in SharePoint instead of Teams (as shown below). In SharePoint, you can share the file with anyone just like in OneDrive. There’s no need to copy a file in Teams to OneDrive to share anonymously. Just open it in SharePoint instead!

<>Controlling Default Permissions

Many businesses prefer to control who can open company documents. You can change the default settings in the OneDrive administration center, but let’s follow Microsoft’s advice to use SharePoint administration instead.

There are separate controls for External Sharing for SharePoint and OneDrive, ranging from Only people in your Organization to Anyone. However, what a static snapshot does not reveal is that the OneDrive settings cannot be more permissive than SharePoint. If you lower the permission on SharePoint, the permission also lowers on OneDrive. OneDrive can be more restrictive than SharePoint but never less restrictive. Since SharePoint hosts OneDrive files, this makes sense.

These settings are company-wide. Let users know before you make changes to global settings that cause changes in expected behavior. You WILL hear from them, and it generally won’t be a happy face emoji.

When guest users are needed, as they frequently are, consider securing the environment with the guidance provided by Microsoft in the documentation page titled Create a secure guest sharing environment.

Savvy admins can control sharing using options available when you click on More external sharing settings on the same screen shown above:

The option Limit external sharing by domain lets you allow or deny sharing to a particular domain. This can be a great way to go when you want to constrain sharing to a specific set of partners or external resources.

Allow only users in specific security groups to share externally lets you control who can share files with people outside your organization. A security group is an Azure AD object that is generally a collection of users and other groups. After populating the security group with users, you can assign permissions and policies to the group, such as granting the group access to a SharePoint site, a mailbox, or forcing members of the group to use 2-factor authentication.

Consider the following scenario. Marketing is involved with a lot of external sharing, so we want to enable sharing for members of Marketing but deny everyone else, AND we don’t want to have to make adjustments every time someone moves into or out of marketing.

To illustrate how this can be achieved with security groups, I created a security group in Azure AD named Marketing-Org and added four users. As employees come and go, members of marketing are added to and removed from this group. (If you haven’t created security groups in Azure AD, it’s straightforward.)

Next, (shown below) I created another security group called External-Sharing.

Security groups can have other security groups as members! By adding Marketing-Org to External-Sharing, the users in Marketing-Org automatically inherit External-Org permissions and policies

After that, I assigned the sharing permissions to the External-Org group. Returning to the SharePoint admin center Policies->Sharing->More external sharing settings-> Allow only users in specific security groups to share externally. Then, by clicking on Manage Security Groups (shown below), I added the External-Sharing group and set them so they can share with Anyone. To limit the ability of everyone else, I added the built-in security group Everyone except external users and set them to share with Authenticated guests only.

In this way, everyone in the company can only share with authenticated guests, whereas only the members of External-Sharing can share with anyone.

The screenshot below shows the result. The user on the left is not a member of the External-Sharing group (the Anyone option is grey and cannot be selected). However, the user on the right can.

Once configured, effective administrators can manage membership of the security groups using PowerShell with the Add-AzureADGroupMember and associated cmdlets.

Storage space per user

Most Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans come with 1TB of storage per user for OneDrive. If there are more than 5 users on a plan, 1TB can be increased by administrators to 5TB. You can even go to 25TB on a user-by-user basis by filing a support ticket with Microsoft.

To increase the storage limit for all users, browse to the OneDrive administration console, and select Storage. Change the setting from 1024 to the new limit. Shown below is updating the limit to 5TB. There are no additional charges for the increase in capacity.

A global or SharePoint admin can change storage quotas with PowerShell after you connect to SharePoint using the SharePoint Online Management Shell and run the following command:

Set-SPOSite -Identity <user’s OneDrive URL> -StorageQuota <quota>.

You have to construct the OneDrive URL from the company name and user name, as mentioned earlier. Then, find the user name from the list of active users in the Office or Microsoft 365 admin center.

For <Quota>, enter a number between 1024 (1MB is the minimum) and 5242880 (for 5 TB). Values are rounded up. 1TB is 1048576.

As of this writing, OneDrive allows files up to 100GB.

Request Files

In some scenarios, you may want to collect files from others, rather than send files to others. OneDrive for Business makes this easy with the Request Files feature. With this feature, users can send an email asking others to upload content to a specific folder.

To set up a request files email, in the OneDrive UI, select a folder, click on the ellipses (…), and click Request files. You will see a window similar to the one shown below.

After clicking Next, you will see the Send file request window:

The email sent by this form provides a URL for uploading content to the OneDrive for Business folder. Request files is a great way to collect and concentrate needed files into a single location for processing. That said, you need to make sure to enable uploads for the folder locations in the request.

Of course, a savvy administrator is thinking, “Hmm, does this provide a way for these users to upload content forever to this location?”

Shown below is the SharePoint admin center for Policies, Sharing.

With these settings, you can put some boundaries around the ability to upload files to location access given in the Request files invitation. These settings apply to anonymous links sent from OneDrive and SharePoint as well. As a best practice, if you permit users to send links to Anyone, which is enabled by default, you should expire those links. Otherwise, over a period of years, there can be hundreds or thousands of URLs that provide access to your content making access control distressingly challenging or impossible without disabling anonymous access altogether.

Folders must be set to View, edit, and upload as shown above to allow users to upload files in response to a file request.

Synchronization

One of the main features of OneDrive for Business is the ability to synchronize files from a user’s PC or laptop with OneDrive. With the synch service running, users can work on files locally, and the changes are sent to the cloud. Also, well-known folder locations such as Documents can be synchronized, ensuring essential documents are both local and in the cloud. You can easily sync Teams File Repositories as well as SharePoint Document Libraries.

The synchronization service is part of Windows 10, so you do not generally need to download it individually. Users can install the service by clicking Start and typing OneDrive.

Click on the OneDrive app to launch the setup. OneDrive is then accessible in the taskbar as the cloud icon (shown before logging in, below).

Alternatively, users can enable the client by logging into onedrive.microsoft.com and clicking Sync.

When installed, users can enjoy the integration of OneDrive with Windows File Explorer. A OneDrive location is visible in the File listing. The OneDrive file listing is unique as you can see if a file is in the cloud (cloud icon), local and in the cloud (checkmark), or synchronizing (arrows). Also, when you right-click on a file in the OneDrive folder, you can Share a file, View online, and check the version history.

Pay particular attention to the following icons. Shown below is a screenshot from one that appears during the installation of the OneDrive client.

TAKE NOTE – File on demand enabled by default!

Imagine this scenario. You are working on an important project with several others. A Teams site is used for collaboration. You’re headed out for an important meeting with your clients, and a colleague posts several important files to Teams. You’ve installed the sync client, and you’re headed off to the airport, so you think “no worries, I’ve got them synced to my laptop, and I can view them in flight.” Aloft, you open your laptop and see there is a cloud icon next to files. Clicking on a file, it’s not accessible. What happened?

What happened is the Files On-Demand is enabled by default.

Files On-Demand marks content that appears in the cloud as cloud-only. A file added to a Teams File Repository will not automatically sync locally. It’s not available offline until you open the file, or set the file or folder to Always keep on this device. Optionally, you could also disable Files On-Demand, which we’ll get to in a minute.

For an important file or folder, right-click in Windows Explorer and select Always keep on this device. Users can also disable Files On-Demand in the OneDrive client by opening the client and clicking More->Settings->Settings, then clear the checkbox that reads Files On-Demand.

When you clear the checkbox, a pop-up message says that, indeed, the files will download to your PC instead of being cloud-only.

Be advised that as the message above states, if your files in OneDrive for Business take up, say, 1TB, then that 1TB will be downloaded to your PC. Local storage needs to allow for this. Also, administrators need to consider the impact on bandwidth should you disable Files On-Demand for many users at the same time.

As an alternative, consider instructing users to mark files and folders they want to always be available offline “Always available on this device” using Windows File Explorer as previously discussed. Then you can keep Files On-Demand enabled to preserve bandwidth as only the designated files and folder will be permanently synched, while those you open, will be temporarily synched. All others will reside in the cloud.

Using Policy

For small businesses, administrators can manage OneDrive for Business effectively with the OneDrive for Business administration console. Larger organizations will be interested in using policy. The policy system for Microsoft and Office 365 is considered the most efficient way to manage many settings including those for OneDrive for Business. Policy-based administration provides administrators control, scale, repeatability, and flexibility.

Policy automation can be a complicated topic and breaks into different scenarios depending on your network architecture and configuration. For those with on-premise Active Directory environments, you manage policy via SCCM or Azure AD Domain Services.

If your environment is cloud-only (meaning, you are not using domain controllers locally), using Microsoft’s InTune service lets you deploy the OneDrive sync service to desktops using the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center.

You can also create and apply profiles to users that control OneDrive behavior. Shown below is a policy profile limiting the client upload rate to a percentage of available bandwidth. This one of many possible settings to control OneDrive policies in Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Previously, you saw how you can limit sharing with anonymous users to members of a specific security group. Similarly, you can apply different policy profiles to different security groups.

In this way, you manage the behavior of OneDrive and many other aspects of your cloud service by membership in security groups. It’s easy to imagine uses for this practice with a group for New Hires, Legal-Review-Team, Alliance Partners, Vendors, or other typical roles with differing needs in a busy organization.

Network Impact

In regards to OneDrive, you want to be thoughtful about bandwidth consumption in your company, especially on the initial deployment of OneDrive for Business. More than one company has had issues with essential business services becoming sluggish when hundreds or even thousands of newly deployed OneDrive for Business sync clients start downloading content at the same time. Files On-Demand, as discussed earlier, helps significantly to reduce the initial bandwidth hit as files located in the cloud are not automatically downloaded to clients when enabled.

Known folder moves (discussed next) can also impact network performance by automatically uploading users’ local folders to the cloud when the client is deployed.

To help manage network impacts, the OneDrive sync client has bandwidth controls built-in. For a small business, you may want to adjust these settings on each users’ system. Right-click on the OneDrive for Business sync client, then click Settings->Network to see the settings.

In a larger business, you can use policy to push the desired settings, including the ability to mark OneDrive network traffic with QoS settings.

Known Folder Moves

Finally, a feature called Known Folder Moves is of keen interest to administrators as it can help reduce support desk calls and ease users’ transitions to new computers when replaced or upgraded.

As you probably know, specific folders in Windows, such as Documents, Desktop, and Pictures, and others are unique. These are “known folders” as they are in the same location in the file system on every Windows operating system.

OneDrive includes a feature where known folder locations are synced to OneDrive for Business. When a user needs a file in one of these locations and their PC is not available, they can access it from any device, including a mobile device that has an internet connection. Also, when a user moves to a new PC or laptop, all the previous documents, images, and important files are online and can easily be synched back to the new device.

Known Folder Moves can be enabled in the sync client by clicking on Setting->Backup->Manage Backup.

Of course, you can also use policy with the methods previously discussed. Should you decide to roll this out, be mindful of bandwidth impacts and network performance,all that content will be uploaded to the cloud.

Summary

OneDrive for Business is an exceptionally useful service. In this article, we’ve discussed many of the key considerations, benefits, best practices, and capabilities of OneDrive for Business so you can effectively manage the service for users. A capable administrator will understand the business use cases for sharing as well as the network impact of OneDrive for Business, and be familiar with how to administer the service including using policy to enforce the desired settings for your Business.

When set up, users will enjoy cloud access to essential files, including their Desktop, Document, Pictures, Team sites, and other files of importance, allowing them to share content quickly and work locally or collaboratively.

Of course, Microsoft is continuously updating OneDrive for Business, so as a last tip, bookmark the Microsoft official OneDrive blog to keep up-to-date.

Source :
https://www.altaro.com/microsoft-365/onedrive-business-tips-tricks/