Are you Protecting Your Microsoft 365 Platform Adequately?

With a material increase in the number of employees working from home and additional pressures placed on IT teams, many organisations haven’t had the time to properly consider the cyber security implications of data being transferred to devices outside the home and onto home networks.

Microsoft 365 has built-in intelligence in this regard, however to protect and govern your environment there are still some considerations that are needed:

Identify potential shadow IT issues

It is estimated that 80%-90% of all data is unstructured, much of which is residing in Shadow IT applications. Having an understanding of what apps are being used across your organisation, together with the volume of data within them, where the data is being shared, and how much data is being transferred between apps is crucial. This diligence will help to identify any potential shadow IT issues you might have. Identifying and responsibly disposing of unnecessary data can save you a material amount when it comes to governance, oversight, storage needs and costs.

Secure your identities on the Microsoft 365 platform

This can be done through several integrated techniques. Most important however is to ensure that your Microsoft 365 tenant conforms to the 14 National Cyber Security (NCSC) principles to cloud security. If these 14 principles are addressed and implemented, you can deliver a much greater security posture. Being able to translate these 14 principles to deliver specific tool sets and configurations depending on which services your organisation plans to use or leverage is crucial.

Classify your data on Microsoft 365

Data classification has significant benefits for organisations, both from a security as well as a compliance stance. If you don’t already have one, your organisation will benefit from defining an information governance model as it will ensure that your organisation is secure and compliant with regard to your data protection and information security.

Look at your external threats

With the recent move to working from home we no longer have the luxury of drawing a security perimeter around our organisations. We are now using mobile devices that means employees can work from anywhere at any time. In turn, the number of threats and the attack surface have exponentially increased. The risk of ransomware, social engineering and phishing attacks have increased. To combat these, Microsoft 365 offers advanced threat protection tools that are AI and machine learning based, such as Active Directory.

Implementing your Microsoft 365 platform often comes with various challenges and knowing how to overcome them is key to ensuring your platform is secure and compliant. When it comes to the management and back up of your Microsoft 365 platform, bluesource can help.

For more information on how to product and govern your Microsoft 365 platform, watch our webcast here or speak to us now.

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