Ransomware is a rising cybersecurity threat. India has the most users attacked by ransomware, while the United States is #10 on the list. Costs are also rising exponentially: $325 million in damages in 2015 with estimates topping $5 billion in 2017. Damages include factors like data loss, lost productivity, forensic investigation, reputational impact, and reactive employee training.
What are you doing to ensure an effective cybersecurity strategy at your company?
We’ve summarized the following new capabilities to help you make the most of Microsoft Ignite – and of your IT investments in the Microsoft cloud. Here’s how these updates keep your digital workplace protected yet productive with secure access for all, by rights:
- Employee collaboration that works. Your teams can now share OneDrive documents outside the organization with your approval, whether people have a Microsoft account or not. It’s simple and secure and only requires a unique code for immediate-use authentication. A unified sharing experience across Office 365, powered by OneDrive, is new and brings consistency to how files are shared and access is controlled. Additionally, contextualized search across SharePoint and Delve is powered by Microsoft Office Graph, which surfaces documents based on where your workforce is working and assigned role-based access rights.
- Simplified IT administration. Cloud App Security integrated with Azure Active Directory provides conditional access to cloud-based applications. You control who can use which documents. For example, you define if an employee using an unmanaged device can download or only view a document. Microsoft 365 Powered Device with OneDrive enables you to replace a PC with over-the-air provisioning, so files are available on-demand to your employees within seconds of login. You’ve now got a slider in the OneDrive Admin Center that makes it easy to adjust sharing permissions – and you can choose where a OneDrive resides in your organization on an individual basis, using multi-geo capabilities. Similarly, with Delve, you decide when to turn on organization-wide access to Microsoft Office Graph and which other Office 365 services to set up for Delve integration, for instance SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
- Strong corporate data defense. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection enhancements protect email against phishing, domain spoofing, and impersonation. Encryption and Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph contribute, so your company’s email and documents are protected against attacks on employees’ identities and external recipients’ use of Gmail and Outlook.com. Other cyber resilience program consideration points include identification-based access to content, multi-factor authentication, and incident response testing to ensure meaningful disaster recovery/business continuity.
More resources for cybersecurity defense
As you think about strategy, policy, training, reporting, and governance at your company, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework offers planning guidance, including a roadmap for those of you in manufacturing. The Department of Homeland Security lays out tips in its Cyber Risk Management Primer for CEOs, which can prepare you for structuring the right discussion with your leadership team to ensure cross-functional business integrity. And this cybersecurity reading list is another good resource.
How will you avoid being the next cybersecurity headline?
