by Office 365 is Microsoft’s premiere cloud service catering to online businesses and individuals. The suite is primarily meant to enhance collaboration and productivity across your organization. It includes basic Office apps and others like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and many more.
The overall Office 365 package allows businesses to transition their operations online. The suite can hold huge amounts of data, and herein lies a big problem. Namely, in today’s business landscape, protecting sensitive data and ensuring the security of cloud-based applications is paramount.
Office 365 requires robust protection to safeguard confidential information and defend against cyber threats. Despite offering numerous security features and access to security settings for individual apps, the suite lacks in quite a few areas. That’s precisely why businesses must find ways to enhance Office 365 protection, whether through fully utilizing the native features or acquiring third-party solutions.
In this article, we will explore the nine effective ways to enhance Office 365 protection, helping you fortify your organization’s security posture and maintain data integrity.
Replace Legacy Authentication With Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Legacy authentication protocols are outdated and the reason why hackers gain access to Office 365. Legacy authentication is a term to describe the most basic method of logging in to Office 365, which is to input the username and password on the login page.
MFA, on the other hand, is one of the most revolutionary authentication methods. MFA drastically improves your Microsoft Secure Score by making it impossible for threat actors to gain access to your suite without having access to another form of authentication. This could be a code sent to your email or an authenticator app. Without the code, hackers have a very short time window to try and hard breach the Microsoft 365 suite.
So, make sure to enable multi-factor authentication on each Microsoft Office tenant to reduce the risk of unauthorized access.
Create Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policies
When it comes to protecting data in Office 365, few security features work better at mitigating data loss risks than DLP. DLP, or Data Loss Prevention, is a series of policies that prevents user accounts from inappropriately sharing sensitive data within the suite.
DLP policies allow you to identify and protect sensitive information within Office 365, such as personally identifiable information (PII), credit card numbers, or confidential documents. By implementing DLP policies, you can prevent accidental or intentional data leaks and ensure compliance with industry regulations.
These policies work with Office 365 services such as SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and the base Office applications. With these policies, you can limit external sharing of crucial data and keep your sensitive data secure from unauthorized access.
Enable Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
Advanced Threat Protection is Microsoft’s communication filtering service. ATP is a powerful service that can detect and take preventive actions against the most sophisticated threats. Some of these include phishing attacks, ransomware attacks, business email compromise, and other similar malware.
ATP works by analyzing attachments, URLs, and email content in real time, providing proactive protection and preventing malicious content from reaching your users’ inboxes. It filters threats through industry-leading artificial intelligence and threat intelligence, which accesses a database of known threats with means to eradicate them.
Moreover, ATP is easily integrated with Azure and Exchange Online Protection. It is an essential service but isn’t included with every Microsft subscription plan. If you want to use ATP, you must have E5, A5, or Business Premium license. But fear not, as ATP can also be bought separately and integrated with your existing plan.
Updating and Patching the Office 365 Suite
There is one particular reason why updating and patching the Office 365 suite is necessary. Namely, Microsoft regularly updates its services and applications with the latest security patches. These are crucial since some security patches address known vulnerabilities and exploits.
Hackers try to exploit these vulnerabilities. By updating, you’re taking away their ability to do so. So, regularly check for updates and ensure you’re using the latest version of the suite. You can also enable auto-updating for each individual tenant.
Conduct Security Awareness Training
Despite the abundance of security measures and features in Office 365, most threats are related to human error. Human error is unpredictable, making it highly dangerous. If your employees lack any cybersecurity knowledge, they will likely make mistakes that lead to data breaches.
Therefore, cybersecurity education should be a priority. Security awareness training is the way to train and educate your employees on cybersecurity matters successfully. These are training programs that teach everything about cybersecurity. They can be basic or advanced, educating employees on topics that stem from password management to ransomware and anti-phishing protection.
Enable Mobile Device Management (MDM)
As more organizations embrace mobile productivity, securing mobile devices accessing Office 365 becomes crucial. Mobile Device Management, or MDM, allows you to enforce security policies, such as device encryption and remote wipe capabilities, ensuring that corporate data remains protected, even on employees’ personal devices.
MDM is becoming more and more important as employees are becoming more reliant on their mobile devices than ever before.
Regularly Monitor and Audit Office 365 Activity
You don’t need to implement a robust monitoring and auditing system, as one already exists in Office 365. The Unified Audit Log helps detect any abnormal activities within Office 365. It works by monitoring user logins, file access, and other actions. With the Unified Audit Log feature, you can quickly identify potential security breaches and take appropriate measures to mitigate risks.
You will need to go to the Microsoft Purview page to enable unified audit log in Office 365.
Use Secure External Sharing Settings
The wonderful thing about Office 365 is that it allows businesses to share files and collaborate with external partners and clients. However, this also puts your organization at risk. Therefore, it’s essential to configure the tools’ secure sharing settings to prevent unauthorized access.
These settings allow you to limit sharing to specific domains, require external users to authenticate, and implement expiration dates for shared links.
Employ Data Encryption
Encrypting is yet another revolutionary security feature that enhances protection even if unauthorized access occurs. Encryption makes your data unreadable, making it useless to threat actors. Utilize Office 365’s encryption features or consider third-party encryption solutions for an added level of security.
Conclusion
Enhancing Office 365 protection is a critical aspect of maintaining a secure and productive digital workplace. Luckily, Office 365 offers numerous security measures and features to help you do that. But it requires a profound understanding of how these features work to fully utilize the suite.
This article helps shed light on the features every business and organization must use to enhance the suite’s protection.
