From the desk of your CSO: Protecting your Business against cyber threats with Microsoft 365

We know that handling IT for a small/medium business is a big job, and since you’re busy keeping the company afloat, we’ve put together a few quick notes about how you can improve security and productivity with Microsoft 365 Business.

OK, so here’s the situation:

Right now, Microsoft is spending billions of dollars every year on cybersecurity R&D. On top of this, Microsoft employs thousands of cybersecurity experts to constantly improve the speed, responsiveness, and strength of our security services. Then there are thousands of other people monitoring and neutralizing the threats and attacks spreading around the globe. The result is a global cloud with more security certifications than anyone else. Right now, the largest organizations in the world store their most sensitive data in Microsoft’s cloud – and they don’t lose a minute of sleep.

After building out this security apparatus, Microsoft had another idea:

Packaging all of this together into a single product tailored for businesses with 300 employees or fewer. It’s called Microsoft 365 Business. It integrates Office 365 Business Premium with a cloud-based security solution that helps you defend against threats, protect your business data, and secure your devices. Microsoft 365 Business improves collaboration and efficiency, and it makes IT management simple. It also narrows down how you manage things, there’s one support team, and there’s one monthly bill. We know you’re very capable when it comes to using different software to meet your company’s needs, but you’re going to be doing a lot more work than necessary if you’re trying to meet all your security, device management, identity protection, encryption and information protection needs by using that many different products.

Microsoft 365 Business helps you:

• Defend against cyberthreats
• Protect business data
• Secure and easily manage your devices

Your top security threat today can be summarized in one word: phishing. For SMBs, between 90-98 percent of all cyberattacks start with phishing.

Personally, we miss the days when phishing attacks were easy to spot: The bad grammar, the unearned but freely given compliments, and the claims of royal affiliation in countries without monarchies. Back then, only the very lonely or gullible were falling for it.

But today, the phishing attacks are so perfectly designed that many of the experts trained to find them can be fooled. In addition to that, many pieces of malware are so brilliantly engineered that they can sweep the globe before conventional anti-virus or security tools even know they exist– and then these programs know how to hide, re-write themselves, and cover their tracks once they’re in your system.

We believe that to combat advanced threats, you need protection that’s even more sophisticated. In our opinion, this is where Microsoft 365 Business can make a big difference.

The cyber defences of Microsoft 365 Business are built on something called the Intelligent Security Graph.

The short version is this: Anytime a new threat is detected anywhere on earth, the rest of the network is automatically updated – these billions of updates pile up into what we think is the single best source of cybersecurity in the world – arguably the best in the universe.