Forum Discussion
I Need Copilot for Microsoft 365 to Work with Local Excel Files
Effective collaboration is everything! Should you change your mind and use OneDrive or SharePoint, then to work with files locally, you simply "synch" the folder locally and you can then work on your files. I work and develop in Excel in this manner daily and have done for years
- Mark, those are your organizations. Those are not our customers.
Also no security professional would recommend putting all data in cloud storage. In fact, during a security audit, the consultants said NOT to do that, and anything in cloud storage should be password protected.
I do wish Microsoft would put more emphasis on privacy and security. I can see why so many companies are getting hit with ransomware attacks. Here is a quote from Seagate, "Ransomware attacks on cloud storage are becoming increasingly common and destructive." All of the cloud providers put language in their Terms of Use indemnifying them for any loss or damage to data.Fair enough, I get there are many different scenarios, I took your "People don't just store files on OneDrive/SharePoint in an organization" as a generalisation, not your specific customers. I also appreciate the battle to get people to organise and have better working practices having fought it for many years. But just to throw in some other observations from security experts
"Security experts generally consider storing files on Microsoft 365's cloud services like SharePoint Online and OneDrive to be safer than storing them locally on PCs when it comes to protecting against ransomware attacks.
Advantages of Cloud Storage (SharePoint/OneDrive):
1. Built-in security controls and threat protection by Microsoft against ransomware and malware.
2. Files stored in the cloud are isolated from user devices, reducing exposure to ransomware infection vectors.
3. Versioning and recovery capabilities allow restoring previous unencrypted file versions after an attack.
4. Microsoft's security monitoring, patching, and incident response capabilities for their cloud services.
Disadvantages of Local PC Storage:
1. User devices are directly exposed to all ransomware infection vectors like malicious emails, websites, removable media etc.
2. If a PC gets infected, all locally stored files are vulnerable to encryption by ransomware.
3. Relies completely on endpoint protection, backup discipline and user security awareness.
4. Recovering from ransomware is more complex when files are locally encrypted across many devices.Most security experts like those from Gartner, Forrester, and SANS recommend treating cloud storage as one critical layer of protection against ransomware, but not as a complete solution. Cloud and local storage used together with backup, recovery, scanning, and other security controls provides multi-layered "ransomware resilience."
The consensus is that while not perfect, the controlled cloud environment, monitoring capabilities, and versioned recovery options of M365 storage services reduce the attack surface and impacts of ransomware compared to solely storing files locally on PCs."This is getting way off topic. This is not a discussion of data storage locations. My customers have a need to open Excel files from their Microsoft servers and use it with Copilot for Microsoft 365.
If Microsoft does not have a solution for this yet, and the file needs to reside on their cloud servers for Copilot to analyze the data, may I suggest that they automate the process of uploading it when the file is opened from local storage, running Copilot on the data, and then automatically storing it back in the original local storage location when completed? It doesn't seem like it would take that much code to do this. Without this automation, it makes it a harder sell to them to purchase Copilot for Microsoft 365.
