April 20, 2021

Advanced security features in Microsoft 365

Introduction

The advent of cloud technology modernized businesses by making them agile and adaptive. It enabled organizations to spur innovation and accelerated scale-up growth. But despite all the benefits that it provides, cloud security vulnerabilities are top of mind for every business leader today.

The cyberattack landscape is continuously shifting. Even following security best practices can’t help in handling unpatched systems and user negligence. Furthermore, recovering lost data and identifying the extent of the breach requires a tremendous amount of time and resources which eventually cause business productivity to suffer.

Security Management with Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 is committed to delivering an unobstructed end-user experience by modernizing and securing data, devices, and identities.

If you are a Microsoft 365 (previously, Office 365) user, you can utilize the most advanced security apps and features to gain greater visibility and control over your Microsoft 365 environment. Let us list some of those features out for you to use in your organization:

1. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection or Office 365 ATP is used to prevent phishing attacks. It protects your organization from malicious links that can enter via emails, attachments, or other applications such as Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Office 365 ATP scans such links that can potentially corrupt the system or steal confidential data and on suspicion blocks them from being opened.

2. Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection

Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection or Windows Defender ATP is a powerful service that detects, investigates, and remediates advanced threats in your organization. Windows Defender ATP is configured in Windows 10 and catches behavioral changes in your operating system. It later helps you to understand the actions needed to neutralize the threats.

3. Microsoft Cloud App Security

When users download unsanctioned apps or apps not certified by Microsoft without the IT department’s knowledge, it raises a security issue called Shadow IT. To overcome this, Microsoft Cloud App Security is built to scan user activities and manage and secure apps. Using the power of discovery and insights, you can get details on how many cloud apps are installed in your organization and can have control over who is accessing the apps. You can secure the data contained in these apps and maximize IT-approved solutions.

Further, people who use Microsoft Teams for collaboration are prominently found to download third-party cloud-based apps to improve their efficiency as well as productivity. In such a case, we recommend the implementation of governance policies to set secure corporate boundaries around your Microsoft Teams environment. This helps in marking of data and effectively monitoring it while it is circulating inside and outside of the organization.

Alternatively, you can use an Office 365 governance solution to simplify all your administrative processes while boosting user engagement.

4. Office 365 Threat Intelligence

Office 365 Threat Intelligence easily identifies threat patterns to discern attack behavior. This way you can intercept security incidents. Office 365 Threat Intelligence provides interactive tool analyses to track illicit content. Using Threat Intelligence, you can create security policies to protect your system against malware and enable compliance.

5. Azure Information Protection

Azure Information Protection (AIP) protects documents that contain sensitive information by encrypting them. It ensures that your content is not visible to unauthorized users. Using AIP, you can track who has accessed a document and control with whom and how it is shared. For example, by setting automatic labels to a confidential file, you can disallow screenshots, disable the save option, or disallow file sharing.

Cloud security is paramount in today’s remote world. The ongoing trends such as usage of a variety of devices to access corporate data, increase in endpoints, installation of popular apps, etc., make it difficult to maintain security perimeters. Hence, Microsoft 365 offers you highly secured cloud solutions to insulate every aspect of your organization against the most modern cyberattacks.

If you need help to know your office security needs and which license is best for you, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com 

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