Communication is vital to any successful collaboration. On MSU’s campus, students, faculty, and staff often utilize Microsoft 365 (known at MSU as Spartan365) applications to drive communication and collaboration in their daily endeavors.
MSU IT’s Messaging team is responsible for monitoring those foundational applications and ensuring they are working properly and securely. Its applications, such as OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint, and Forms, account for roughly 1 petabyte of data (equal to 1,000 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes). Broken down, that equates to approximately 1.6 million Teams chats, 161 million files in OneDrive, and 47 million files in SharePoint.
MSU IT recently placed all Microsoft 365 applications behind Okta, the university’s chosen Multi-Factor Authentication solution, to enhance security of all that data. The added level of authentication makes sure only those who should have access to information can access it.
“It was so important to get Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) turned on for our systems,” Stehouwer said. “We have an impressive team that works well together, but it was a daunting task.”
In addition, the Messaging Team processes more than 50 million email messages each month, performing a delicate balancing act to thwart spam and phishing attempts.
“The team is protecting faculty, staff, and student against phishing attacks and dealing with mail flow issues all of the time,” said Messaging Team manager Matt Stehouwer. “We have to make sure not to scrutinize too harshly. It can be a cat and mouse game, but we must watch out for campus.”
Stehouwer said there are typically 100,000 people using email daily on campus. So his team must continuously monitor Microsoft alerts to ensure everything is working smoothly.
“The better we work, the less you know we’re here,” Stehouwer said.
Spartan 365 and its suite of applications are available to all MSU students, faculty, and staff at no cost while affiliated with the university.
