Recent trends towards remote work have indicated that people use both unmanaged and managed devices to access corporate resources. One of the most common use-cases involves signing in with your Microsoft work account to access your company files. A cybersecurity lapse that typically happens when people use unmanaged devices is that they forget to sign out when they are done with their activities.
To tackle this problem, Microsoft has now announced the general availability of a new feature that is called idle session timeout. This is essentially a tenant-wide configuration that IT admins can leverage to automatically sign out people from Microsoft 365 web apps after a period of inactivity.
Microsoft says that after engaging in conversations with customers, it has realized that firms want a predictable implementation that allows them to configure a timeout policy across all Microsoft 365 apps. Idle session timeout is the solution that solves this problem. The Redmond tech giant has outlined several benefits of configuring this setting including the prevention of data leakage, compliance, and a consistent user experience across all Microsoft 365 web apps.
Although idle session timeout is generally available, it will be rolled out in a staggered manner from June to August 2022. It will encompass Office.com, Word, Excel, PowerPoint for the web, Outlook on the web, OneDrive for the web, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 admin center. Microsoft plans to roll it out to Government clouds later in the year.