This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs) are increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated cyber threats like targeted phishing or ransomware. Especially during these challenging times, when SMBs are looking to secure their environments as their employees are trying to work remotely from homes. Compounding matters for SMBs are the lack of resources and enterprise grade tools to combat these sophisticated attacks. That’s where Microsoft 365 Business steps in.
Microsoft 365 Business is a comprehensive suite of enterprise grade security tools curated specifically for SMBs with less than 300 employees. It provides a layered approach to security that spans Identity, Email and Device security.
Layered approach to defending against cyber threats
When dealing with advanced cyber threats, customers need to holistically protect their end points that seamless integrate with each other. There are various point solutions in the market that focus on one aspect like Anti-Virus or Email Security or MFA individually but when these are not integrated, it may mar the productivity experience for end users, which might undermine security efforts in the long run. The security tools in Microsoft 365 Business not only work across various end points but also seamlessly integrate with each other. Lets show you how:
Identity Security: Managing the security of your credentials is the corner stone of protecting your business from cyber threats. In Microsoft 365 Business, you can manage identity by enabling Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Conditional Access (CA)
- MFA: Enabling MFA, whereby, the user has to put in a code or answer a phone call, apart from logging in with their username and password, helps mitigate most cyber attacks since attackers rarely have access to both forms of authentication. Enabling MFA is highly recommended as a means to prevent cyber attacks in case your credentials are compromised
- Conditional Access: This features helps you control access on the basis of location, app, device state and user state. In case a user is coming in a from a location that you generally don’t do business in or if a device is compromised, you can use conditional access feature to restrict access in these cases. CA is extremely effective in safe guarding access based multiple criteria rather than simply relying on username and password
Email Security: Many SMBs consider phishing to be the top security concern for their business. Since most phishing attacks occur through email, protecting your email from sophisticated phishing attacks become paramount. Microsoft 365 Business includes ‘Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection’ that helps protect against phishing attacks. Here’s how:
- Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection: helps guard your business against sophisticated phishing and ransomware attacks that are intended to compromise employee or customer information. Features include:
- Sophisticated Attachment scanning and AI-powered analysis to detect and discard dangerous messages
- Automatic checks of links in email to assess if they are part of a phishing scheme and prevent users from accessing unsafe websites
- Anti-spoofing Intelligence to warn you against domain impersonation intended to trick users in to thinking that the email is coming from an entity inside the organization
Device Security: Protecting your devices from ransomware attacks is extremely important. Here’s how Microsoft 365 Business protects your devices from external threats:
- Windows Defender Ransomware Protection: Windows Defender not only has the top rated pre-breach capabilities, with features like Controlled Folder Access and ‘Network Protection’ it can also reduces the attack surface area and isolate ransomware from accessing your sensitive files. It is highly recommended that you enable the Windows Defender Antivirus protection in Microsoft 365 Business as Windows Defender Antivirus is the most deployed in enterprise
- Conditional Access for Device Compliance: Using CA, you can also ensure that devices that are non compliant or vulnerable are not able to access corporate resources, hence, protecting your environment from being accessed by potentially harmful devices
We hope that this blogpost helped enumerate how Microsoft 365 Business helps secure your business from cyber threats. For more details on Microsoft 365 Business, please visit aka.ms/m365b