Unlock The Tech: Secure Your Business From Anywhere

Today I’m going to breakdown the second track in the Unlock The Tech series, Secure Your Business From Anywhere and try to pick out all the MUST KNOWS! from each session. So let’s get into everything Microsoft Security..

Day 1: Identity and Access

Did you know in the past year we’ve seen a 300% increase in identity attacks? making Cloud Endpoint Technical Specialist, Damien Sweeney’s session SO! relevant right now.

Azure Active Directory is the hero product in this session – a universal identity platform that helps you manage and secure all of your apps and users. Azure AD operates at a truly global scale, currently there are over 300K organizations using Azure AD with over 425M monthly active users and 30B+ daily authentication requests!!

So why are so many people putting their trust into Azure Active Directory?

• Secure Adaptive Access to resources and data using strong identification and risk based adaptive access.
• Seamless User Experiences providing an simple and quick sign in experience to increase user productivity
• Unified Identity Management, manage all your identities and access to all your applications in a central location whether they are on cloud or on premise, this improves visibility and control.
• Simply Access Governance, control access to apps and data for all users and admin effectively. As well as automated identity governance to ensure only authorized users have access.

Find out more here: Azure Active Directory | Microsoft Azure

Day 2: Information Protection

On Day 2, Darryn O’brien Security, Compliance & Identity Specialist informs us that:

• >80% of corporate data is not classified, protected or governed
• 88% of organizations no longer have confidence to detect and prevent loss of sensitive data

I think we can all agree that these figures are unsettling! In Microsoft our north star for our Information Protection and Governance solution is built around being able to provide you with a rich set of capabilities to:

1. Know your data (Multiple classification methods)- think Built In, Flexible, Organised: Microsoft provide you with 100+ data classification methods that you can use straight out of the box to get started. The solution also enables the of use regex, keywords, and exact data matches for data identification. Further, there are a variety sensitive types available that are mapped to different industry regulations. Think of this as the first step,

• The second is Trainable Classifiers (leveraging machine learning to automatically classify unique data) – think Built-in, Build-Your-Own, Integrated:

1. Protect your data (Customize protection policies based on data sensitivity)
2. Prevent data loss
3. & Govern your data

across your devices, on-premises, and multi-cloud data locations from Microsoft and third parties.

Day 3: Threat Management

My key takeaway for Security Specialist, Vanessa Carcedo’s sessions is: Not everything behind the corporate firewall is safe!

We no longer except to access corporate resources solely from the office or on company owned devices. Organisations now find themselves responsible for protecting a criss-crossing web of technology’s, many of which they do not own or manage. As these company’s digital footprints increase (so many different devices, user groups and SO much corporate data!) it is becoming abundantly clear that traditional perimeter based security models can’t keep up with the sophistication of today’s threats, neither can they provide the stability and controls they need to secure today’s highly distributed and hyper-mobile environments.

Which brought Vanessa onto Microsoft Defender , this helps defend against today’s increasingly complex and sophisticated attacks, empowering organizations’ defenders by putting the right tools and intelligence in the hands of the right people.

So how does it work?

Microsoft 365 Defender, part of Microsoft’s XDR solution, leverages the Microsoft 365 security portfolio to automatically analyze threat data across domains, building a complete picture of each attack in a single dashboard. With this breadth and depth of clarity defenders can now focus on critical threats and hunt for sophisticated breaches, trusting that the powerful automation in Microsoft 365 Defender detects and stops attacks anywhere in the kill chain and returns the organization to a secure state.

Find out more from Microsoft Security CVP Rob Lefferts: Microsoft Defender | Extended Detection and Response (XDR) | Microsoft Ignite 2020 – YouTube

And just don’t take our word for it…

Day 4: Endpoint Manager

The final session of the week was delivered by Cloud Endpoint Technical Specialist, Damien Sweeney.

Throughout this track, all of the speakers have provided us with one clear consistent message “Technology needs are evolving in the Modern Workplace” >>>>>>>

The old ways just simply are no longer sufficient, we need to start thinking about IT differently –

..And Microsoft Endpoint Manager is Microsoft’s vision on how to address these problems in the Modern World – a cloud-enabled transformative platform for unified and secure endpoint management, that enables you to:

• support a diverse mobile environment and manage IOS Android, Windows & Mac OS devices securely
• keep devices and apps are compliant with the security controls and environments that you have in your organisation
• to create policies to keep data safe on company owned and personally owned devices

All on a single unified solution!

My key takeaways are, Microsoft Endpoint Manager is the:

• Most Complete – Microsoft Endpoint Manager delivers the most complete management of modern workplace,
• Most Secure – it provides extensive cloud powered insights and policy-driven actions for the most secure protection of your data,
• & Fastest time to value – it removes barriers to productivity on any personal and company-owned devices without compromising security.

…And that’s a wrap for week 2!

You may or may not have joined us for our Modern Work & Security: Unlock the Tech Series but fear not, you can catch all the recordings from the Secure Your Business From Anywhere track here – Unlock the Tech SMB Series – Secure Your Business From Anywhere: Main Page – Ireland Cloud Champion

If you want to talk Modern Work & Security please reach out any time to myself @ leenglis@microsoft.com and I’ll be happy to help! ? & Stay tuned for next weeks breakdown of our Modernize Communications track.