Assess and improve your Security Posture with Microsoft 365

Increasingly sophisticated threats mean that organizations must constantly reassess their security. And in today’s era of digitalization and cybercrime, organizations are becoming increasingly worried about their ability to defend themselves against data breaches, cyberattacks and insider threats.

As we just recently announced that we are now a Microsoft Managed Partner, we aim to give light to these issues by delving into the right tools which are already available in Microsoft 365 to measure and improve your enterprise security.

What is Security Posture?

Security posture refers to the current state of an organization’s security—that is, its overall fitness to protect its identities, endpoints, user data, apps, and infrastructure. An organization’s security posture is not static: it changes constantly in response to emerging new threats and variabilities in the environment. Enabling protections, like multi-factor authentication (MFA) for administrators, strengthens a company’s posture. A lack of vigilance, such as failing to update endpoints or use available protections can weaken an organization’s security posture.

A major challenge to improving an organization’s security posture is its ability to accurately and objectively measure it. It takes a considerable time for corporations to compare their security configurations to best practices, known risks, and other organizations in the industry—and that’s if the data is available, which isn’t guaranteed. Furthermore, for a security assessment to be useful, organizations must assess their security continuously and track results over time.

What is Microsoft 365?

Data is your company’s most valuable asset by a long shot. At any given moment you should know what data is sensitive and be able to control access to it. In this new digital world where devices and users roam free, it’s even more important to have smart, adaptive security that doesn’t slow down productivity.

The intelligent cloud offers an opportunity to do security better. Cloud computing has fueled an intelligence revolution and keeps us connected like never before; so imagine if you could change how your enterprise did security sharing security signals worldwide and going on the offensive with advanced hunting capabilities. That would be a game-changer, wouldn’t it?

Microsoft 365 is an integrated bundle of Windows 10, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, sold on a subscription basis. Microsoft 365 is the evolution of the bundles formerly known as “Secure Productive Enterprise E3 and E5.”

With Microsoft 365, guarding your data as a valuable asset starts with a great user authentication experience, accessible from any location for any device. Access levels and how users are authenticated dynamically adjust based on user or device risk.

Threat protection tools communicate with each other to connect security signals across your entire digital footprint and automate threat protection, investigation, and remediation which makes life easier for your security operations team.

With security built-in, not bolt-on, integration and deployment are simplified, ultimately helping to reduce the number of security vendors you manage. It even secures third-party platforms, apps, and services.

Microsoft 365 provides complete, intelligent security that adapts to any modern workplace, delivering identity and access management, information protection, threat protection, and security management.

How can Microsoft 365 help you improve your security posture?

• Understand your current security posture.

In order to be able to improve your security posture, you need to measure it and know where you stand.

With Microsoft Secure Score in the Microsoft 365 security center, you can have increased visibility and control over your organization’s security posture. From a centralized dashboard, you can monitor and improve the security for your Microsoft 365 identities, data, apps, devices, and infrastructure.

Microsoft Secure Score gives you robust visualizations, integration with other Microsoft products, comparison of your score with other companies, filtering by category, and much more. With the tool, you can complete security improvement actions within your organization and track the history of your score. The score can also reflect when third-party solutions have addressed the recommended improvement actions.

• Protect against emerging threats.

New security threats emerge almost daily. Thus, a better understanding of these threats is an effective way to quickly evaluate the organization’s exposure to specific, complex threats and manage its security controls accordingly.

By using Threat Analytics in Windows Defender Security Center – a set of interactive reports that Microsoft publishes as soon as it identifies new threats and outbreaks – you can learn about these emerging threats detail by detail!

Each threat report provides a summary that includes where the threat is coming from, where it has been seen, and the techniques and tools the threat uses. These threat reports also provide a list of mitigations for common vulnerabilities and exposures as well as detection details.

Threat analytics can also assess a threat’s relevance and current impact on your organization’s endpoints. It can also recommend actions you can take to contain an attack, increase endpoint resilience to it, and prevent it.

• Educate users about email phishing attacks

3. Educate users about email phishing attacks To identify vulnerable users in your organization, the Attack Simulator in Office 365 ATP is a good use to run a realistic phishing attack. It creates a phishing email with a sender’s display name that recipients will trust in order to entice them to click through to the phishing sign-in server. The attack simulator provides email templates readily available to use, or you can customize your own. The simulated phishing email will then be sent to everyone in the organization. It tracks users’ clicks, so you can identify who requires additional training.

By simulating an attack company-wide, you can be able to educate employees without embarrassing individuals. As a result, they will be more receptive to his suggestions and become more mindful of email security

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When it comes to cybersecurity, most organizations are still confused about which strategies to choose to protect their data, maximize their cybersecurity spend.
Regardless of which industry you operate in, knowing your cybersecurity posture is essential in building a long-term security strategy that will protect your organization, outline a concrete cybersecurity roadmap and help you strengthen your cybersecurity defenses over time.

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Data Connect Technologies Pte Ltd is a dynamic ICT and Services Provider with over 15 years of experience in providing excellent IT support to companies all over the world. Got problems in your security posture? Or you’re just not sure about your IT security status?