A digital transformation can empower you and your staff to collaborate more effectively from any location, and on any device, knowing that vital data is protected against cyberthreats. It can also reduce the time needed to manage your technology infrastructure so more resources can be dedicated to your organisation’s mission.
The Cloud is at the heart of achieving these benefits. Thanks to the Cloud, many organisations of all sizes are discovering that they can create more value through their core activities if they can delegate IT infrastructure and broad business software functions to trusted partners.
Microsoft’s Cloud computing solutions are trusted by organisations across industries, all over the world. With Microsoft 365, you can enable more secure collaboration by giving the right people access to information they need thanks to an identity-based approach to security and compliance in one intelligent solution designed to work across your entire operation.
Here are five ways that Microsoft 365 can help you benefit from the Cloud without compromising on security and compliance.
Microsoft 365 For Non-Profits
Flexibility and Control
You want your team to be able to work anywhere, on any device, without an overly cumbersome IT process. Your employees are probably not the only users you want to be able to connect to your systems. Volunteers, donors, beneficiaries, and other outside partners also may need access to some parts of your IT systems. Today the “outside” of your organization’s network is no longer defined by your firewall, but by the credentials your employees, donors, volunteers, and other external associates use to log onto your network, often from remote locations.
With Microsoft 365, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) lets you centralise identity and access management and enable deep compliance management, governance, and productivity, across devices, data, apps, and infrastructure. Azure AD simplifies compliance and security, and is built to work for apps in the Cloud, on mobile devices, or on-premise.
Intelligent Security
Cyberthreats continue to evolve rapidly, making it difficult for traditional signature-based malware identification tools to keep up. Your organisation needs intelligent security that can identify emerging threats before they cause problems.
Microsoft 365 can help. Using vast computational analytics resources, Microsoft analyses data from more than a billion Windows devices and more than 400 million monthly email messages to detect new cyberattacks in their earliest stages. The result is the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. With Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection in Microsoft 365, this intelligence is applied to your organization to detect anomalies within your IT ecosystem and protect against zero-day threats automatically.
Control Applications
Your staff probably rely on an ever-growing number of internal and third-party tools to get their jobs done, including cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) apps.
Maintaining visibility and control over mobile applications has required fully enrolling devices in a mobile device management solution. Now, with Microsoft 365, you can use Mobile Application Management (MAM) in Intune to manage internal and external applications from a single cloud-based solution.
Minimise privileged access
A key principle of modern security is ensuring least-privilege access, meaning that users are provided with the minimum administrative permissions for the shortest period necessary to do their jobs. This reduces the chance of a malicious user having high-level access, or an authorized user inadvertently affecting a sensitive resource.
Using Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM), you have granular control over access privileges to your IT resources. You can easily see which users are assigned, and enable on-demand, “just-in-time” administrative access to Microsoft Online Services such as Office 365.x`
Single Sign-On
Many organizations rely on SaaS applications to help boost staff productivity. Historically, the IT department needed to create and update user accounts in each SaaS application individually, and employees had to remember a different password for each SaaS application. The alternative is for users to create their own, potentially insecure credentials for each service. The more identities they have, the more likely they are to forget or lose one of them, creating a potential security risk.
By providing users with the convenience of single sign-on across all types of applications, you can help reduce the risks and headaches associated with having multiple identities.
Azure AD extends on-premises AD into the cloud, enabling your staff to use their primary organizational account to sign into their domain-joined devices and to company resources, as well as to all the web and SaaS applications they use to do their jobs.
Enhancing your security and compliance capabilities by getting Office 365 as part of Microsoft 365 gives you powerful new tools for providing highly secure, yet seamless, workplace experiences, while minimizing complexity and reliance on third-party applications.
To benefit from Microsoft 365 in your organisation, get in touch with ACUTEC today.
