'Personal Vault is a protected area in OneDrive that you can only access with a strong authentication method or a second step of identity verification, such as your fingerprint, face, PIN, or a code sent to you via email or SMS. Best of all, access to the Personal Vault is restricted after a period of inactivity, forcing a new authentication. You can even 'scan' documents directly to this special folder using your smartphone camera. Visually, it should be easy for consumers to understand, which is essential. Its brilliance is seemingly in its simplicity - it is a OneDrive folder with a bank vault icon that requires additional authentication, such as SMS, biometrics, a pin, or the Microsoft Authenticator app.

You see, Microsoft will soon be launching a new feature called 'OneDrive Personal Vault' which will allow users to better secure their sensitive files in the cloud. As they say, 'don't let perfect get in the way of better' - the cloud is better.Īnd today, OneDrive is getting better too. I'd rather consumers trust the cloud as opposed to not backing up at all and transferring files with non-encrypted USB flash drives. Cloud storage is hardly perfect from a security and privacy standpoint, but for many consumers, it is an essential way to backup and access files. These days, many of their documents and photos are saved in the cloud. Long gone are the days where consumers were expected to backup data to clunky external hard drives to prevent losing files to a hardware failure (something many never bothered to do).

Microsoft personal vault