Enterprises in today’s digital world are onboarding more devices and creating, using, and storing more data in cloud-based services than ever before. According to Check Point’s 2019 Cloud Security Report, the cloud industry is growing exponentially and is expected to rise from the current revenue of $227 Billion in 2019 to $354 Billion by 2022. This year, we witnessed a record number of data breaches with employees and client’s information stolen in enormous quantities. A misconfigured cloud environment was the main cause for the vast number of data theft incidents.
Cybercrime up 600% due to the Pandemic. The COVID-19 outbreak has changed the way people work worldwide and has considerably switched the way organizations operate, making them rethink security as a business priority to fight against cyberattacks and protect their employees, data and devices.
There are some other concerning stats that you should be aware of:
- The average large organization has to sift through 17,000 malware warnings each week.
- 99 days are the median amount of time for an organization to discover a security breach.
- It takes less than 48 hours for attackers to have complete control of a network.
- 4 million dollars is the average cost of a data breach to a company.
Microsoft unified the Microsoft 365 Defender technologies
In the past months Microsoft released a new set of security, compliance, and identity innovations to help customers simplify and modernize their environments. Some of those updates included the rebranding of the following technologies:
- Microsoft 365 Defender (previously Microsoft Threat Protection).
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (previously Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection).
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (previously Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection).
- Microsoft Defender for Identity (previously Azure Advanced Threat Protection).
However, there is something that has not changed at all and is the basic human nature and the need to feel safe. Being and feeling safe is what allows us to do and create more, as well as to have trust in the technology that connects us all. Microsoft 365 comes with a wide array of pre-configured security features, and it also requires you as customer to take responsibility to secure your own identities, data, and devices used to access cloud services.
Continuing with the Microsoft’s announcements, below I’ll list some other modern and integrated capabilities.
Microsoft Secure Score
Microsoft Secure Score is a free security tool that every organization can use to better understand and improve its security position against today’s advanced threats. This tool analyzes your Office or Microsoft 365 environment in terms of how secure it is and suggests refinements that can further reduce your overall risk. Secure Score helps organizations:
- Report on the current state of the organization’s security posture.
- Improve their security posture by providing discoverability, visibility, guidance, and control.
- Compare with benchmarks and establish key performance indicators (KPIs).
If you’d like to see more detailed information, visit this website here.
Modern security with Microsoft Defender Services
As remote work has grown dramatically over the last few months, you need to make sure you have the correct information to help secure your organization’s remote workers. Microsoft Defender uses powerful workflows and AI to correlate alerts across attack vectors and provides an end-to-end view of the attack, and automatically heal affected assets.
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is now available for all major platforms, with the general availability of protection for Android devices and a preview for iOS.
- Threat and vulnerability management macOS support
The cross-domain detection and response capabilities from Microsoft Defender are deeply integrated with Azure Sentinel, reducing complexity and increasing visibility so that defenders see what matters when it matters. Microsoft offers a unique approach that empowers security professionals with both cloud native SIEM (Security Information & Event Management) and XDR (Extended Detection and Response) tools from a single vendor.
Microsoft Threat Protection (MTP) is an integrated, cross-domain threat detection and response solution. With MTP, security teams can:
- Automatically block attacks and eliminate their persistence to keep them from starting again.
- Prioritize incidents for investigation and response.
- Autoheal assets.
- Focus unique expertise on cross-domain hunting
What can you do to protect your organization?
I’d like to share four steps you can take to make your organization safer and more resilient:
- Use multi-factor authentication. Move toward passwordless.
- Have a plan for keeping software up to date and patch, patch, patch!
- Get a handle on all devices connecting to your network, from phones and laptops to edge devices, and how you’re detecting potential threats to all of them.
- Use benchmarks and insights like Microsoft Secure Score and Compliance Manager to understand your posture and track your progress.
In the meantime if there is any question you may have, or you’d like to connect with our specialists to work on your specific needs, you can reach out to us at contact@vnextiq.com, otherwise stay tuned for our next Security blog as we’ll keep sharing tips, updates and announcements.
