How Secure is your Office 365?

Office 365 has a wide variety of built in security features, however, most businesses don’t utilise them correctly and therefore open themselves up to malicious attacks.

Two ways cybercriminals gain access to your Office 365 accounts is through brute force or your password which they acquire by performing social engineering tactics.

Another way they can gain access is through stolen devices. If you use Onedrive and your device is stolen, it can be used to access confidential company information if there are no security measures in place.

Employees can unknowingly be leaking information because the basic precautions are not in place and this leaves their machine and company data vulnerable.

Office has features that can assist in fending off these sorts of attacks and malicious activity but to ensure full email security, we still recommend that you include a solution like Mimecast to provide an enterprise grade layer of security on top of your Office 365 deployment and protect you from email-borne attacks.

A Few Technical Recommendations for Office 365:

1. Two Factor Authentication.

Two Factor Authentication is one of the best ways to protect yourself against password breaches because this adds another layer of security. Office has an easy to use multi-factor authentication capability to ensure all your Office 365 accounts require more than one authentication method.

How does it work? You will link your mobile device to the authenticator and a unique code is generated every 30 seconds. This way even if your password falls into the wrong hands the multi-factor authentication code will protect you and significantly reduces the possibility of your account being compromised.

2. Data Loss Prevention Policies

This policy can be used to monitor confidential files such as financial reports in OneDrive. These policies allow you to control who has access to edit, view or even send these files to prevent data leaks.

3. Mobile Device Management Policy

The MDP can be used to control the mobile devices that have access to your office 365 environment. If a device is lost or stolen, you can remotely wipe the device and remove and company information.

There is a wide range of additional tools that can be deployed within your Office 365 or Azure environment to make you more secure.

We are here to help, get in touch with us today to make sure you are doing all you can to be cyber safe within your organisation.

Martin Erasmus