Keeping Data Secure in Office 365

With cyber breaches on the rise, organizations must remain ever vigilant in guarding against them, especially when considering that the average breach costs an organization about $3.8 million. Thankfully, as users of Microsoft's Office 365, you are better protected from breaches.

But there are still a few precautions an organization can take to put the last touches on their security suites. Let's delve into just a few.

Office 365 Secure Score

The fastest way to judge how secure your Microsoft environments are is through Microsoft's analytics tool.  Secure Score looks at everything  from multifactor authentication (MFA) to data audits to mailbox auditing to password storage and hashing. For a greater explanation of how the score is calculated, go here for more information. 

Office 365 Cloud App Security

You should definitely enable O365 Cloud App Security. After an organization sets up their security policies based on their business needs, this application tracks anomalous activity and acts on it. It can be configured to send alerts to admins so that they review unusual or risky user behavior like downloading large amounts of data, sign-ins from unknown or dangerous IP-addresses, or if multiple sign-in attempts fail. It's an easy first line of defense to warn key personnel if there is behavior on an organization's networks that falls outside of normal behavior.

Multi-factor Authentication

Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) easiest way to prevent accounts from being compromised. An organization can have all the firewalls and layers of protection they want, but if a user compromises their account by way of a phishing email or other method than all those defenses get bypassed. Multi-factor authentication makes sure that only trusted devices are able to log in to accounts, when an account owner expects them to. And, depending on the software chosen for multi-factor authentication, account access can be limited to just one trusted machine that has the required access token. That is significantly harder to compromise.

Set Up Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Sometimes security concerns are more than just thinking about malicious actors breaking into your networks. More times that not, data leaks are the result of employees sharing confidential information inappropriately. That's where configuring your DLP rules come in. It can detect when user are about to move  content incorrectly and prevent them from going through with the action.  Your organization can set up locations that have protected data, conditions content must meet, and actions to take when conditions are met. This way a negligent employee or bad actor is stopped from taking inappropriate actions by the system itself. A good example would be preventing an employee from improperly emailing patient data and violating HIPAA regulations.

Take-Aways

There are a whole host of reasonably simple, built-in measures an organization can take to further improve its Microsoft environment's security. That is one of the major perks of choosing to go with a SharePoint environment to run your intranet or other internal portals. Security can be an expense with no ceiling and breaches can be events with seemingly devastating costs. Using a Microsoft environment that enables cost efficient security mitigators can be a huge advantage. If you have any questions about using these security features with Office 365 or want to know how they pair with a SharePoint intranet, like IntranetPro, please reach out!