There's no unauthenticated access to Office 365, and communications are encrypted, including browsing sessions (like OWA, and the Admin Center), PowerShell sessions, SMTP delivery, and so on. Encryption is indispensible, as O365 is a "connect from anywhere" service, available wherever you have access to the open Internet.

However, if you want to minimize your Internet exposure while using O365 services, Microsoft's recent announcement - that ExpressRoute is coming to O365 - is welcome news.

ExpressRoute has been available for Azure services for some time, and is very much like the custom connectivity required for O365-Dedicated services (and the BPOS-Dedicated services before that). With ExpressRoute, your network is connected to a partner network (such as AT&T's), which in turn connects to Microsoft's edge network without traversing the Internet. A logical, dedicated, secure connection is created between your network and Microsoft's. Data delivered to or from O365 follows this secure route. The announcement is fairly light reading. The Azure documentation on ExpressRoute provides more technical detail.

ExchangeMaster can work with you to plan, deploy, and manage ExpressRoute -- contact us today to get started.

* Note that some elements in O365 are delivered via content-delivery partners like Akamai, and those most likely will be retrieved via the Internet. Typically, these elements are things like the icon banner in an OWA window.