As Email is getting more and more critical for Organizations of all sizes, people are slowly waking up to the possibility of leakage of data via Email especially since lot of sensitive Information is now being exchanged via Emails.  One such area is via download of Email attachments when using a browser.

Many Security sensitive Organizations take precautions to ensure that users cannot configure Outlook on any system except their Office Desktop or Laptop. And for urgent access, these users can access mails via browser. Now a user who logs in to the browser can access his mail and download any attachment to his home PC. And this is exactly a situation which is causing the Organizations to lose sleep. From productivity perspective it is important to allow users to access mails via browser when they are out of office. But how does one prevent them from downloading sensitive documents to the unauthorized PC?

Fortunately, there is a solution available. The Administrator of Exchange Online can configure additional rules for users by which when the user opens his browser to access Email, he will see the Email message. But if the user tries to download the attachment, the system will give him a message “You do not have permission to download”. Please refer to the screen shot captured below where a user is trying to download a file and the system gives him the message:

Thus, the Admin can combine 2 techniques:

1) Prevent user from configuring Outlook on any PC except his Work PC.

2) Setup the account such that User cannot download attachment from browser.

 By doing so, a major Security hole can be blocked.