Microsoft has opened up its AccountGuard service to individuals and organizations in over two dozen democracies, with an eye on upcoming elections in different parts of the world.
Microsoft AccountGuard is a security platform specially designed for users in the political space, helping to shield them from cybersecurity threats.
“Today, we’re announcing the expansion of Microsoft’s enterprise-grade identity and access management protections to all AccountGuard members in 31 democracies at no additional cost,” said Jan Neutze, Senior Director, Digital Diplomacy at Microsoft.
New features
Neutze shares that AccountGuard’s identity and access management features were piloted ahead of the 2020 US presidential elections.
Initially aimed at political candidates and members of their staff, Microsoft expanded AccountGuard to protect healthcare workers as well, in the wake of the pandemic.
It was the positive feedback from these early deployments that buoyed Microsoft to expand the program’s reach, which Neutze shares, now also covers human rights organizations, and newsrooms.
While announcing the expansion of the program to all countries in the European Union, along with several others including Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, India, and others, Neutze also revealed several new AccountGuard features.
Some of these more advanced features include multi-factor authentication, single sign-on service, ability to define conditional access policies, and more.
The company is also enhancing its collaboration with Yubico to provide up to 25,000 of its hardware security keys to AccountGuard customers in the US, Canada, and the EMEA.
Via: ZDNet