In this blog series, we explain the tools available – and how they work together – to protect your assets in Microsoft Office 365 and Azure.

Security is a broad topic, but the goal is the same. Most of us just want to know answers to questions like:

  • “Do we have security?”
  • “Is there enough security?”
  • “Should we improve our security?”

Security used to be a scary topic, somewhat inaccessible and best reserved for nerds and cyber sleuths. Now it’s critical.

Why Asset Protection is Important

While working as a consultant at a global manufacturer in the 1990’s, I first heard the phrase, “Security is everybody’s business.” This company had, and still has I imagine, a robust security-training program with videos and classes and such.

I admit that I scoffed at this effort until the first time I flew somewhere for business. Across the aisle and one row up, a well-dressed man extracted a laptop and shared with all of us the financial information of his company. Ah, I thought, now I understand.

We’ve come a long way since those days. Yet I still get questioned today about why I use complex passwords and two-factor authentication for everything. Hint: Some service passwords in Azure require 12 characters and I will always recommend multi-factor authentication.

With everything in the cloud, security is now more important than ever. Especially when it comes to protecting your two biggest assets: identity and information.

Read the Series

This focus on those two assets – from the tools available to how they work together to achieve a holistic and security-centric approach to your cloud investment in Office 365 and Azure.

While the focus won’t be on the technical procedures to implementing these tools, rest assured that I’ll direct you to the technical references everywhere possible.

Read the blogs:

  1. Encryption – includes encryption technology and key management
  2. Legal Issues and eDiscovery – searchability, findability and retention
  3. Identity Control – principles and administration
  4. Security Policies – information classification, data loss prevention policy creation
  5. Physical Architecture – the new network perimeter
  6. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – data retention and recovery
  7. Operations and Monitoring – staying secure in the midst of change

Up first, Office 365 and Azure Encryption. This topic will serve as a platform for baseline security in the cloud and thus is involved in most of the other topics. Bookmark this page and check back weekly.

Want to learn more about Office 365 and Azure implementations or protecting your organization’s information assets? Contact us.