Microsoft 365, previously called Office 365, is now a few years old and most businesses have been using the service for several years. Initial adoption of Microsoft 365 often centred around email and moving away from an on-premises Exchange server to Exchange Online. IT departments were very happy to give the headache of maintaining Exchange to Microsoft, in exchange for a monthly license fee.
Move forward to 2022 and amount of Microsoft 365 services is vast, with Teams coming to the forefront during the pandemic, now boasting over 145 million daily active users. However, lots of businesses are still sitting on environments that were configured years ago, that may have security weaknesses, may have under-utilised license features and may be paying more than they need to.
Making the most of your licenses
There are over forty individual apps and services that are available in the Microsoft 365 universe, with features changing every 36 hours – incredible. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that most businesses aren’t using all the features available to them and that not all services are configured with a best practice approach in mind.
The Koris365 Health Check reviews your current license estate and examines usage statistics across your entire user base. Based on this information we can advise whether current licenses are providing value to the business. We also look at whether switching to a license that may not have even been available when the service was set up, will save the business money or provide additional value.
Security and the pandemic
As a Microsoft Gold Partner we have done a numerous Microsoft 365 security assessments. Last year, at the start of the pandemic, companies across the country had to quickly enable remote working for their employees and as a result the importance of their cloud security has become even more critical.
After the start of the pandemic, Microsoft released some useful guidance for ensuring that employees were working in a secure manner, even though they were no longer in the office.
That blog post list several products that Microsoft offer to help with secure remote working, but it really takes a partner like Koris365 to guide a business through understanding which ones are applicable and the sort of impact they may have when enabled.
As part of our Health Check, Koris365 will provide a security assessment of the Microsoft 365 environment to understand the current configuration. To this end Koris365 have an internally developed set of best practices and scripts which allow us to quickly review the security settings of your Microsoft 365 tenant. Our process reviews over 100 different settings across your estate, settings which we know will enhance your security posture.
The next step is not simply to just go and turn all these settings on, this could have a negative impact on productivity and cause frustration with staff. We work with your business so that you understand the current configuration and why we recommend certain changes. We then agree which changes to move forward with and ensure that everyone in the business is aware of what will be happening.
Some of the key areas we look at are:
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Is multi-factor authentication enabled for all staff?
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Is self-service password reset enabled?
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Is auditing enabled for all activities?
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Are legacy email protocols like IMAP and POP3 disabled?
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Is the ability to automatically forward email disabled?
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Are anti-phishing policies configured?
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Is email encryption enabled?
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Are data loss prevention (DLP) policies configured?
Once these changes have been implemented, your Microsoft 365 environment will be adhering to best practices and the business will be better protected. Add a Koris365 support contract to the mix and you will benefit from monthly reviews of your Microsoft cloud solutions and rapid responses to any automated security alerts.