Cloud storage and computing solutions, as well software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms such as Microsoft 365 have become increasingly popular among businesses with remote and hybrid work models.
Microsoft 365 is a popular choice for businesses, and it’s easy to understand why with powerhouse productivity and collaboration tools such as Office Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. These features and capabilities of Microsoft 365 perfectly suit the new hybrid work model that is the new norm in Australian business.
The challenges of effective security and compliance with data protection for your organisation can be conquered by Microsoft 365 which has built-in capabilities to meet security and compliance standards.
Microsoft 365 security and compliance
Robust security should be a priority for any organisation and is vital to protect your company’s critical data. Data compliance regulations help provide peace of mind, protecting your sensitive data through protocols that dictate the way you use or store it. Data compliance regulations exist to protect your company’s data, but they also offer protection to your customers. By following data compliance regulations, you can reduce the risk of data breaches and regulatory fines.
A lot of data is collected by businesses, which can make it difficult and time-consuming to achieve compliance with the law. It’s a must for safeguarding your company’s digital assets and making sure that your business complies with relevant Australian or international laws.
With Microsoft 365, security and compliance teams have centralised management capabilities across all of the services in Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Office 365 Defender Portal and Purview Portal. These offer email security and data protection that is purpose-built for businesses using Office 365 business products, Outlook, and Exchange servers.
Microsoft Office 365 security
The Microsoft Defender Portal is a unified console with a single view of security that provides a centralised location for monitoring, managing and reporting on Microsoft 365 security solutions. It is a single pane of glass for security operations. This unified view of security capabilities allows customers to assess their security posture, prioritise their risk, and remediate vulnerabilities by using a simple, easy-to-use console. The Defender Portal allows users to track and monitor the security of their environment, receive actionable insights through real-time monitoring, and receive notifications when security events occur.
Microsoft 365 security measures are based on capabilities such as:
- Encryption: This is the process of converting data into a form that cannot be read by anyone except authorised parties. For example, in Microsoft 365, business data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
- Monitoring and auditing: This refers to monitoring your organisation’s data storage systems and activities as well as audit trails for actions taken by users on these systems. In Microsoft 365, monitoring and auditing are carried out through activity-based audit logs that can be searched via activity-based search queries such as “who changed this document?” or “when was this document last accessed?”. This can help you track who has accessed business data and when, and what they were doing.
- Protection against malware: Malware refers to malicious software (such as viruses, worms and trojans) that can infect your systems and disrupt normal operations. In Microsoft 365, malware is detected and removed through a combination of automatic updates to the Office 365 applications as well as malware scanning of email attachments.
Microsoft 365 compliance
For businesses that use the cloud, compliance with regulations is their biggest concern. Businesses that are lax about data privacy, security and protection risk severe penalties for non-compliance. To stay compliant with enforced standards or regulations, you need to continually assess whether your business meets these requirements and what actions it should take to do so. Microsoft has made it easy to stay compliant with all your legal, regulatory, and technical requirements. The Microsoft 365 Purview Portal allows you to assess compliance risks in various ways, provide workflows for defining controls, and keep track of data privacy and information security needs.
In general, software products that provide data loss prevention capabilities often work by blocking users from copying or sending sensitive business data to external email addresses or printing it out. In Microsoft 365, you have the option of preventing users from copying or forwarding business data to external email addresses or printing it out using Exchange Online’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features.
Identity and access management (IAM) is an important security feature that safeguards the confidentiality of your data. It offers authentication tools such as strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, and single sign-on (SSO) to reduce the risks of login attempts. Additionally, IAM grants access to resources based on what role or department users are in.
More businesses today are turning to Microsoft 365 to increase their productivity and collaboration capabilities, and to ensure business continuity no matter where their teams are. Talk to the Microsoft certified experts from INTELLIWORX today about effectively managing your organisation’s security and compliance standards.
