Microsoft makes it clear companies using its cloud products have a responsibility to protect themselves. Is your company among the 63 percent of enterprises currently running applications on Microsoft Azure? Are your employees among the 200 million monthly active users of Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)?
If the answer to either question is yes, our recent white paper can help ensure your small or midsized organization is using Microsoft’s cloud offerings as securely as possible.
Steps you can take for hardening your Microsoft cloud:
With nearly infinite configurations, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to cloud security, but there are best practices to minimize your risk. A single compromised credential can serve as a beachhead for larger attacks, so securing your M365 accounts should be a high priority. The top three threats to M365 accounts are:
- Password-based attacks
- Credential phishing
- Consent phishing
Why your cloud cybersecurity program needs machine learning:
The biggest issue for IT professionals securing the cloud is data. Having your entire data center facing the internet means a massively expanded attack surface to monitor for anomalies. The data grows exponentially with the complexity of your network. The longer a breach goes unnoticed, the deeper a hacker can penetrate and the more damage they can do. But how can you tell if one user or account is behaving strangely?
With the potential for billions of events a day, technologies that ingest logs (like SIEM) can generate alerts at a blistering rate no human could possibly keep pace with. The solution is anomaly-detection models that use past data to establish a baseline and allow security professionals to determine what normal activity looks like. This high-fidelity detection helps identify attacks with fewer false positives, reducing the risk of “alert fatigue” in your security team.
Read our executive summary to understand how to fortify against them. We also discuss end-user training, since human error is ultimately to blame in up to 90 percent of all data breaches.