Is your Office 365 as secure as you’d hoped?

27 Jul Is your Office 365 as secure as you’d hoped?

Is your Office 365 as secure as you’d hoped?

Like many small and medium businesses, you’re probably starting to explore cloud-based solutions like Office 365 (renamed Microsoft 365 earlier this year – read more here.)

If you weren’t aware of the name change, there’s no need to worry: your Microsoft 365 subscription is still as secure as before. But how secure is the Microsoft 365 suite? And are you taking advantage of all of the security features offered? Whether you’re working in the office or remotely, now is the definitely the right time to ensure that your data is fully backed up and your business is protected.

Common risks today can range from phishing emails with malware attached to company-wide data breaches. Trying to balance these risks, whilst also staying productive, is a challenge for many businesses. Microsoft 365 offers features that can automatically scan for those dangerous links, phishing emails and unrecognised users.

A good example of this is Microsoft’s set of data loss prevention (DLP) policies. Whenever you store sensitive information within your Microsoft 365 suite, say via an Excel or Word document, DLP automatically detects which information is sensitive and will inadvertently prevent it from being shared outside of your organisation without encryption. This allows you and your staff to get on with your working day, without having to dedicate time to filing, categorising and discussing how to keep sensitive data safe.

Keeping your organisation’s data secure is paramount to maintaining a good reputation with customers. Larger companies are expected to be able to avoid 100% of data breaches, but monitoring such a large number of employees remotely, as has been the case during the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to errors.

Twitter’s recent hacking happened due a large number of email accounts with administrative privileges, but without the necessary security features to protect them, such as multi-factor authorisation (MFA). If security isn’t embedded into the top-level priority list for large and small businesses, there will always be a risk of cyberattacks and a break in customer trust.

Luckily for Microsoft 365 users, you can choose the privileges each employee gets, and it doesn’t have to be a ‘put all your eggs in one basket’ approach. You can provide tenant administrative access to your staff for the areas where they might need it most; logging onto your company’s CRM maybe, or making recurring purchases for office supplies. As a further measure, you can make use of Microsoft 365’s multi-factor authorisation tools so you are notified of any permission requests for certain login attempts.

A simple security measure you can implement for ease of mind would be to enable auditing and reporting, so you can review recent employee activity. This can help build trust between departments when you are considering granting tenant administrative access to individuals.

By enabling tenant administrative access, you can delegate tasks accordingly and get those essential jobs done on time. It can also boost both your security stance, whilst encouraging greater productivity, as your staff won’t be waiting around for somebody to approve a purchase or log them onto the organisation’s CRM.

We highly recommend you make use of the security features Microsoft 365 has to offer; your Microsoft 365 will only be as secure as you’d hoped if you are making the most of all of the features available. By doing so, you can further protect your organisation from both insider attacks, and external breaches. Let us help you to unlock the security features that you might not yet know about and support you in fully securing your business.