Starting with the Personal Vault, Microsoft is giving users a “protected area in OneDrive” to store their files. The company says users can implement “strong authentication” to access the files. This feature comes at an ideal time for Microsoft. Earlier today, we reported on data that shows OneDrive has seen a 60% surge in the amount of malicious files hosted on the service. In its report, FireEye says OneDrive has observed this significant rise, the largest amongst its three rivals, Dropbox, Google Drive, and WeTransfer. In fact, the service went from being comfortably the safest cloud storage provider in terms of malicious files last year to be the second worst. Microsoft suggests Personal Vault will require two-factor authentication to access files. Content stored in this location is encrypted within the cloud before it lands on your device. Microsoft users BitLocker for its encryption, and the company tells customers to enable encryption on their device. Personal Vault for OneDrive is coming to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand this summer. The rest of the world will get the feature before the close of 2019.
Storage Boost
Also, on OneDrive, Microsoft announced users can now buy additional storage on the app. The $1.99 monthly subscription now offers 100GB of storage instead of the previous 50GB. Office 365 customers can increase their storage to 1TB while also being able to incrementally update storage capacity by 200GB for $1.99 per month. In total, Office 365 users can increase storage to 2TB in OneDrive. Microsoft says, “Only the primary account holder can purchase additional storage, and the additional storage will only be available to the primary account holder to use.”
