The most important thing your business provides isn’t a service or a product. It’s trust. And it comes from letting your customers and employees know that you’re protecting your business—and their data—against cyberattacks.
Building a foundation for trust isn’t easy. Cyberthreats continue to grow in number and complexity as businesses shift more of their operations online and enable anytime/anywhere access to information to support an increasingly remote workforce. This ongoing digital transformation exposes more systems and data to potential attacks – increasing risk for your organization.
Addressing this challenge requires a new approach to protecting business information. “The assumption that everything’s on-premises and protected behind a firewall has largely disappeared,” says Robert Crane, principal at CIAOPS, a technology consultancy that specializes in helping businesses improve their productivity by using technology and smart business practices. “But some businesses are still locked into that old-world thinking.”
Inaction can lead to increased risk. A Techaisle study found that although 85% of small and midmarket firms say security is a top concern, just 32% have tested their responses to breaches or security incidents to ensure effective protocols in a crisis.
“Everyone’s aware that security is important. But in a lot of cases, they don’t appreciate it until they’ve been bitten,” says Crane. “You insure your car, your building, your employees—and you need to do the same for your IT. Security software is the insurance to prevent you from losing millions of dollars because of phishing or some other attack.”
Security “insurance” includes keeping your entire technology environment, including business applications, up to date. Putting off upgrades creates unnecessary risk, because outdated systems expose your company to a wide array of security threats, such as malware and phishing attacks. Businesses should be wary of increased security vulnerabilities that arise with an unsupported operating system that will no longer be patched to protect against new threats.
Microsoft has built comprehensive security capabilities into Microsoft 365 to help you defend against advanced cyberthreats and simplify IT management with a single, integrated solution. Specifically, Microsoft 365 gives you the ability to defend against advanced threats with the following capabilities:
- Advanced Threat Defender (ATP) Safe Links, which helps employees avoid malicious websites by scanning any links they click in emails and documents in real time to block unsafe destinations. ATP Safe Links also protects against sophisticated malware by performing advanced analysis of email attachments in a sandbox environment to detect newly developed malware.
- ATP antiphishing intelligence, which enables security teams to deploy policies that use machine learning models and impersonation detection to further protect against advanced phishing attacks.
- Azure Multi-Factor Authentication, which enables teams to configure advanced policies that disable access from untrusted locations or bypass multifactor authentication from trusted places such as your office network.
- Windows Defender, which enforces malware protection across all Windows 10 devices and protects files in key system folders from unauthorized changes made by ransomware.
In an age of uncertainty and heightened risk, establishing and maintaining trust with customers and employees is even more critical to success. Modern technology can help protect your most important assets.
Download the Business Leader’s Guide to Microsoft 365 Adoption
