Steps You Need to Take to Lock Down O365
Ninety-one percent of all cyberattacks begin with email. If your managed IT services provider hasn’t discussed the risk of cyberattacks on your Office 365 email account with you, they’re doing you a grave disservice. We have seen a sharp uptick in the past few weeks of Office 365 accounts being compromised. This is concerning.
Since its release in 2011, Microsoft Office 365 has gained in popularity for enterprise, small and medium businesses alike. Because it is used by more organizations than any other productivity suite on the market, it is also the most hacked platform ever. It’s just too easy of a target for hackers. Often the victim is unaware of the breach until after they are alerted by someone outside their organization that they received a suspicious or uncharacteristic communication, or they realize payments aren’t making it into their vendor’s accounts.
When first introduced, the email platform was riddled with bugs and suffered from chronic downtime. Emails were often lost, and security was (and still is) a major concern. For this reason, we have historically steered our clients away from O365.
However, in the past year, Microsoft added multi-factor authentication and other advanced security measures to make it a more secure platform. We feel like, with these new safety features, O365 is a good and viable option for businesses that want access to all the other features it has to offer – like Teams and Intune. To be clear, you must set up these advanced security measures to avoid being hacked by criminals.
Here are three things that you and your managed IT services provider must do now to safeguard your organization:
- We have identified 22 security policies that secure and lockdown Office 365 accounts to help avoid a hack. We highly recommend that you consider implementing these right away.
- We also urge you to provide ongoing cybersecurity training for your team members. Security is a team sport that requires endorsement from the executive level and participation from all members of your team.
- It is critical that your finance team implements internal controls for finance procedures. For example, have procedural controls in place and do not rely solely on email for account changes, payments or financial changes. Using multiple verification methods with multiple parties and based on a tiered payment system can help reduce the risk of money being scammed by criminals.
If your managed IT provider hasn’t done this already – or at least made you aware of the danger – it might be time to find an IT partner who takes the security of your organization’s data seriously.
To learn more about how MIS Solutions protects small and medium businesses from the very real threat of cyberattacks, contact us today.