How Microsoft Can Keep Your Business Safe

Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are concerned about their ability to safeguard their data and prevent cyberattacks, yet often lack the most fundamental security measures. They know that organizational security has never been easy.

As more threats are present online, and they are growing in number, businesses need to invest in great security software with top-noted quality. However, some cybersecurity tools are costly, and some cannot afford to implement them. So, some don’t invest in them at all. Fortunately, there are companies that create software to protect business data with their award-winning features.

Microsoft is one name you can always find that offers features not only designed to meet the business’s needs but security features that offer excellent protection.

If you are one of those businesses that use Microsoft products to run some of their tasks, you are in luck because the company has always made sure to incorporate only the best protection on their products. So whether you are using a Microsoft 365 Business or their latest operating system, you’ll be greeted with premium security you can’t find in some software.

Features of Microsoft That Can Keep Your Data Safe

Protection Against Online Threats

Phishing and ransomware assaults are used by cybercriminals to trick users into downloading malware and viruses or unintentionally handing over critical information. These attacks may result in serious problems for a company, such as a decline in customer confidence or financial difficulties.

Microsoft now offers sophisticated protection against cyber threats to help reinforce your defenses against phishing, malware, and viruses.

With the aid of Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, you can secure your company from sophisticated phishing and ransomware attempts that target email, OneDrive, and Teams and are designed to compromise customer or employee information. You are safeguarded in the following ways by Office 365 ATP:

• Advanced email, OneDrive, and Teams attachment scanning that employs AI-powered analysis to find and delete harmful messages.
• Automated checks of links in emails, documents, and Teams to determine whether they are phishing scams and stop users from reaching dangerous websites
• Anti-spoofing intelligence to alert you to domain impersonation used to deceive recipients into believing the email is coming from a company official

Protects Devices

Employees are currently accessing company data and working on a variety of laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. Keeping all of these devices secure as individuals use them to work with sensitive corporate data is a challenge. Microsoft comes with features to protect all your company’s devices.

Microsoft Intune is a feature dedicated to protecting devices within an organization, and here’s how it protects them.

• Intune (PC)

Employees must keep their work devices updated to ensure full protection. With features like remotely erasing data from devices or enforcing security standards, Intune can help you fully control your PCs additionally keeping those devices up to date.

• Intune (Mobile Devices)

Intune offers flexibility in how much control you wish to exercise over mobile devices that access your corporate network. You might not want complete control over a user’s personal device in a bring-your-own-devices (BYOD) scenario where employees are using personal mobile devices. However, you might still want to secure the company data that the user is accessing. In this situation, you can secure enterprise data on the device using Intune app protection policies.

You can “enroll” a device into Intune Mobile Device Management and fully control the device settings and configure the security policies if you want complete control over a user’s mobile device.

Stop Inadvertent Business Data Leaks

Over half of small businesses acquire and store social security numbers as well as bank account information, making up the majority of organizations that handle sensitive data. Despite employees’ best efforts and sincere intentions, preventing unintended leaks of this sensitive information can be difficult.

However, there are features in Microsoft apps that enable businesses to secure their data from leakage.

• Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Staff working from home run a higher risk of mistakenly disclosing sensitive information. However, DLP can help you identify, monitor, and safeguard sensitive data from being shared by email or documents.

• Exchange Online Archiving

EOA aids in safeguarding all corporate data and preserving it in the event of misplaced or stolen equipment, infrastructure breakdown, or to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements. It protects data by making it simple to archive messages and documents so they may later be accessed from anywhere at any time. For eventual electronic discovery or restoration, it saves user information, including deleted objects.

Safe and Reliable collaboration

In this boundary-less digital world, parties must build confidence with one another immediately. However, trust is a hard thing to come by online. Identity is essential in this new world when digital “handshakes” are more prevalent than analog ones.

Microsoft offers a connective network that enables individuals, groups, applications, digital services, and smart devices to make instantaneous access decisions based on exchanging secure, privacy-respecting credentials.

Here are some ways your communication and collaboration with your team are secure with Microsoft.

• Azure Confidential Computing can support multi-party computation and data protection while in use.
• A healthcare playbook with built-in indicators and an editable machine learning template is being added. Insider Risk Management will assist healthcare organizations in identifying potential insider threats related to patient data exploitation.
• Communication Compliance may now examine information in attachments delivered through Teams besides text-based messages, assisting enterprises in upholding a great workplace culture and a strong commitment to user privacy.

Secure Account Access

Enabling work-from-home scenarios requires, among other things, ensuring that users can securely access systems remotely from any location and device. You can accomplish that with the aid of the following features in Microsoft;

• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Besides entering their login and password, the user may also need to enter a code or answer a phone call. This extra layer of security makes sure that even if the user’s username and password are stolen, as may happen in a phishing attack, non-employees cannot access your environment.
• Conditional access allows you to restrict your environment based on factors such as location, app, device status, and user state. One option is to use conditional access to limit access if a user is logging in from an unidentified and hacked device.
• Azure AD Application Proxy: Many businesses have mission-critical programs running locally that are inaccessible from the internet. You can externally publish these applications using Azure AD App Proxy. It is a simple agent that gives your on-premises apps internet access without giving everyone on your network access.
• Using Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) may simply activate this scenario if you have apps that include sensitive data, like financial or medical information, and you want to ensure that users working from home can access that data safely. Users can remotely view a virtual desktop created by WVD. Employees are unable to save any data on their local workstations and can only access that information in that remote virtualized session.

Conclusion

Microsoft for business implements the best security tools that your organization can benefit from. It has multiple security features that are secure from email to data sharing. It is expensive but in return, they have the most outstanding infrastructure built for businesses.

AUTHOR BIO

VANESSA VENUGOPAL
Vanessa Venugopal is a passionate content writer. With four years of experience,
she mastered the art of writing in various styles and topics. She is currently
writing for Softvire Australia – the leading software eCommerce company in
Australia and Softvire New Zealand.