Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

If someone wanted to cause serious damage to your organisation, where would they start? Not with your filing cabinets. Not with your server room. They’d probably start with your Microsoft 365 tenant, because that’s where your emails, files and customer data live, and where your entire operation runs. Thankfully, Microsoft 365 comes with powerful security capabilities built in. However, having those capabilities and being protected by them are two different things.

Your business almost certainly runs on cloud services. From document storage, email and finance software to your customer data and internal systems, the chances are that most of what keeps your business operational lives, at least in part, in the cloud. And yet, for many businesses, the question of whether that cloud environment is secure rarely gets asked. It tends to be presumed. After all, you’ve got bigger things to worry about. You’re with a reputable provider.

Due diligence in a merger or acquisition is, by design, exhaustive. It brings a level of scrutiny that touches almost every part of a business. From financial audits and legal reviews to commercial assessments, buyers work hard to make sure nothing important gets missed. And yet there’s one area that continues to catch organisations off guard, even in the most professionally run due diligence processes: The cost of a data breach has never been higher. Digital estates have never been more complex.

Your business is growing. Your IT team is doing a solid job. And your cybersecurity feels like it’s broadly in order. You’ve got firewalls in place, antivirus software running, and backups happening somewhere. But there’s a nagging question that won’t quite go away; Do you actually know where you stand from a cybersecurity perspective? For many organisations, the honest answer is no. Not really.

Microsoft 365 is one of the most widely used business platforms in the world. However, most businesses use only a fraction of what it offers, and leave some of its most important security features either switched off or set up incorrectly. M365 offers far more than the productivity tools we are all familiar with, like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Used properly, it’s a powerful cybersecurity platform. Used poorly, it offers a false sense of protection.