M365 - Exchange Online Center

Many organizations regard their people as their greatest asset. There is no disputing that the ability to hire great talent is a critical component to success, but in today’s pandemic-work-from-home world these great assets could also pose the greatest risk to your business. No amount of technology can account for human nature. You may already have invested in the best security solutions, but all it takes is a single click of a phishing email. I like to refer to this as a people problem – something that technology cannot solve entirely.

It’s no secret that the IT landscape has changed dramatically over the past 8 months. Due to the pandemic, organizations have had to pivot overnight, and what was hoped to be a short-term problem has turned into the new normal. This applies to the way these organizations deal with their customers, employees, and business partners.

Azure Active Directory Conditional Access has been around since 2016. Conditional Access governs access to cloud resources by evaluating the conditions associated with the sign-in of a user or application accessing a resource. Conditional Access policies allow an admin to stipulate under what conditions certain actions are enabled. I like to think of them as If-then statements. For example: If: “Sign in comes from an untrusted network, accessing any cloud app”, then: “Require another form of authentication (MFA) before granting access to the cloud app”

Deactivation of Basic Authentication in Exchange Online

In their blog article, "Improving Security - Together," the Exchange product group announced that the insecure Basic Authentication authentication method switches off on October 13, 2020, not just for Exchange Web Services (EWS), but also for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), POP, IMAP, and Remote PowerShell.

Have you rad part 1 yet? This is a hefty topic, thus we had to break it up to two blogs. In part 1, Dominik Hoeffling goes over Outlook Mobile security basics, securing access to the service,securing the mobile client, and more!

At Microsoft Ignite 2018 last year, Ross Smit IV, Microsoft’s Principal PM Manager in the EEM Customer Experience Engineering team ran a groundbreaking session on deploying Outlook mobile securely in the enterprise. In his Ignite session, he discusses how to meet high security and compliance demands without compromising productivity or the end user experience. In this blog, I am going to recap the session and inform how you can keep company data safe with Enterprise Mobility + Security (EM+S).

Over the last several years Microsoft has made tremendous headway in showcasing the value proposition of the Office 365 platform and suite of collaboration tools. In fact, the argument can be made that the Office 365 suite of tools has helped fuel the team-based way of working. A recent report shows that 80% of your time during work hour is spent collaborating like conference calls or meetings.¹  McKinsey sheds additional light on this increase in collaboration by stating that 45% of workers are using social technologies to accomplish daily tasks².

The security perimeter has changed dramatically over the last 5 years. The landscape has gone from a tightly controlled on-premise environment to data, identities, and devices being spread across on-premise and several cloud systems. How can you protect your data and identities while using a spectrum of on-premise and cloud applications and devices? How do you monitor and identify threats? How can you quickly identify the pre and post-breach of systems across on-premise and the cloud? 

Office 365 is Microsoft's premier cloud service, and the clear leader in the "back office" server cloud offering market. If your organization has not moved to Office 365 yet, it's a safe bet that someone within your organization will be making a strong push to get you there soon.

Since the dawn of email, organizations have struggled with the way that users reply to emails. Confusion (or worse) occurs when emails include groups, CC, BCC, internal, and external recipients. Choosing to use "Reply All" may release confidential information to the wrong people or cause mail storms between senders and recipients – sometimes bringing email servers to their knees.