What Is Microsoft Office 365 Security?
Microsoft Office 365 Security is one of the world's most popular Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms, with over one million businesses using it. Despite its convenience, however, it brings additional security risks that businesses must examine and manage as part of their cybersecurity risk management strategy. Platforms such as Office 365 are appealing because they provide an all-in-one solution for corporate data storage, communication, and collaboration. These solutions had been gaining traction for years before the COVID-19 epidemic, and the ensuing transition to widespread remote labor rendered them indispensable for many businesses.
How Secure Is Microsoft 365?
ecurity is a primary concern for both small and large enterprises, given the rise in cybercrime. But first, let's define Microsoft 365 before we get into how Microsoft can help you with security. Microsoft 365 is one of the world's most popular productivity suites. Microsoft 365 is used by over a million businesses worldwide, while Microsoft Teams has almost 250 million monthly active users. Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365), which includes Office 365, is a subscription-based suite of productivity and security tools and services. Microsoft 365 includes all of the features of Office 365 plus more, such as business-class email, cloud storage, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), Windows 10, and more.
Microsoft 365 is a highly secure platform that improves cooperation and productivity. Its data centers are protected by cutting-edge security infrastructure and systems, making direct breaches almost difficult. Microsoft 365 comes with a 99.9% application uptime guarantee that is backed by money. Other security elements include identity and access management, threat prevention, information protection, and security and risk management.

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What Are the Security Features of Microsoft 365?
Microsoft 365 security is based on four main pillars:
Identity and Access Management
Microsoft identity and access management (IAM) solutions allow your IT department to manage digital identities, allowing secure access to your company's resources like apps, networks, and databases. With risk-based access controls, identity protection technologies, and strong authentication choices, Microsoft IAM helps you defend against questionable login attempts and secure user credentials. It enables your IT managers to efficiently manage which users have access to which resources by assigning the appropriate access levels using role-based access control.
- Secure Adaptive Access Protects your users' identities from being stolen. You can ensure that only authorized users and reliable devices have access to your organization's important resources and data by implementing strong authentication and real-time, risk-based adaptive access restrictions.
- Seamless User Experience IAM eliminates the effort and time spent managing passwords by allowing your users to sign in to applications quickly and easily. This keeps your user safe while also increasing productivity.
- Unified Identity Management Gives you more visibility and control by allowing you to manage all of your identities and app access from a single location, regardless of whether they're in the cloud or on-premises.
- Simplified Identity Governance Enhances security by allowing you to manage all users' and administrators' access to resources. Only authorized users have access to your company's apps and data thanks to automated identity governance.
With Aspire Tech, security and admin teams can quickly and efficiently discover, protect, monitor, and verify security and compliance in Microsoft 365.

Centralized Risk Visibility
Aspire Tech Posture Explorer provides a unified view of Microsoft 365 security posture, allowing you to see System Settings, Roles, Groups, and Users. To identify potential security concerns, use Aspire Tech Insights — Aspire Tech SaaS security specialists outline the insights, which are aimed to make Microsoft 365

Protection & Remediation
Detect data theft and control Posture Policies for Exchange, SharePoint, Intune, Azure AD User settings, Mail transport rules, Conditional Access Policies, and Identity settings for important Microsoft 365 modules. Learn about Sharepoint Data Access, including new Policies, Access Explorer, and Role and Time-based

Continuous Monitoring
Continuously monitor to ensure security posture and cleanliness, prevent data leaks due to misconfiguration, and demonstrate and maintain regulatory compliance. In existing SIEM and collaboration technologies, get high-fidelity detection warnings.

Verify Compliance
Maintain SaaS security compliance standards throughout time and demonstrate regulatory compliance - CIS benchmarks, SOX, SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, and others. From a centralized console, generate security and compliance reports.
Threat Protection
Threat protection from Microsoft comprises integrated, automated security solutions that help safeguard your email, data, applications, devices, and identities against evolving cyber threats.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) You may use Azure Sentinel to detect and prevent attacks before they cause any harm. It provides you with a comprehensive view of your company. Azure Sentinel, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), allows you to swiftly detect threats and respond to suspicious situations.
- Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Microsoft 365 Defender and Azure Defender's XDR capabilities safeguard your Azure and hybrid cloud workloads while preventing and detecting attacks across your identities, endpoints, email, data, and cloud apps.
Information Protection
Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) helps you find, organize, and safeguard sensitive data across clouds, apps, and endpoints for your business. MIP's skills and solutions assist you in understanding your data, protecting sensitive data, and preventing data loss.
- Data Classification Allow you to identify essential data across your cloud and on-premises settings and label it appropriately to manage where the data goes. Data classification allows you to protect sensitive information regardless of where it resides and guarantees that it is properly kept or removed by accordance with your company's needs.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) By allowing you to develop and maintain DLP policies in the Microsoft 365 Compliance center, you can help protect your organization's sensitive information, including financial data, credit card details, health records, and social security numbers, and so on.
- Microsoft Information Governance (MIG) With in-place administration, automated policies, defensible disposal, and pre-built data interfaces, you can easily manage information lifecycle and records (retain or delete information) and stay compliant with data protection requirements.
Security & Risk Management
To safeguard your organization's vital information, Microsoft 365 security and risk management helps you swiftly identify and address issues from both malicious and inadvertent activity.
- Insider Risk Management Through measures such as insider risk policies, you can identify, detect, assess, and take necessary action against insider risks in your firm.
- Communication Compliance Allow you to rapidly identify and respond to problematic statements that violate your company's code of conduct policy, reducing both internal and external communication hazards.
- Customer Lockbox Allow you to have more control over the data in your firm. You can control how Microsoft support engineers access your content with the Customer Lockbox function, which allows you to authorize or refuse access to your data.
- Privileged Access Management (PAM) Allow you to manage privileged admin access by reducing privileges from otherwise powerful accounts and only giving them the access they need to accomplish vital privileged activities.
- Advanced Audit Increases audit log retention, which aids in forensic and compliance investigations. It also gives you access to key events that can help you figure out how big a breach is.
Office 365 Security and Compliance Center
The Office 365 Security & Compliance Center manages compliance across Office 365. It enables you to manage archive mailboxes, establish eDiscovery cases, examine auditing reports, and set retention and deletion policies within Exchange Online, OneDrive, and SharePoint Online. You can also grant compliance managers in your organization access to part or all of the compliance tools included in the Security & Compliance Center by permitting them.
The Enterprise Mobility and Security Suite offers solutions that complement Office 365's security capabilities (EMS). EMS enables management across users, devices, apps, and data and is divided into E3 and E5 providing bundles, similar to Office 365. This section contains solutions for taking your enterprise mobility strategy to the next level.
With a single platform for phone, conferencing, video, and sharing, you can now simplify your infrastructure. Connect your teams to the Office programs they use every day and give them the experience they want. Power BI Pro and Skype with Telephone Systems are included in Office 365 E5. There's never been a better moment to acquire the most comprehensive Office 365 offering, thanks to all of the new capabilities and the just-announced Office 2016 apps.

Microsoft 365 Security Best Practices
Ensuring the security of your Microsoft 365 account is crucial in today's digital landscape. Here are the top five best practices to enhance your Microsoft 365 security:
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a crucial security measure that adds an extra layer of protection to your Microsoft 365 account. It requires users to provide two or more authentication methods, such as passwords, phone passcodes, or fingerprints, to verify their identities. Even if threat actors know your password, this prohibits them from getting unauthorized access to your apps and data.
- Dedicated Admin Accounts Dedicated admin accounts are vital for security because they limit access to sensitive functions. Ensure that your administrators use separate user accounts for non-admin tasks and only switch to admin accounts when necessary. As they have heightened access, admin accounts are a gold mine for cybercriminals.
- Office Message Encryption Microsoft 365 includes various encryption features, such as Office Message Encryption, which ensures the secure exchange of email messages both within and outside your organization. Additional encryption choices include BitLocker and TLS connections, which protect your files on Windows machines, as well as OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, created and managed in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center, are essential for compliance and data protection. They help prevent the loss or unauthorized access to sensitive company information. Your company's sensitive information will not be lost, mistreated, or accessed by unauthorized individuals if you have a DLP policy in place.
- Anti-Phishing Protection Microsoft Defender for Office 365 provides robust anti-phishing and safe attachment security features. These features are designed to protect your organization against phishing attacks, malware, viruses, and other risks commonly delivered through email attachments and links.
Ultimate Microsoft 365 Data Protection with Aspire Backup
You may be questioning why you need additional security when Microsoft 365 comes with a financially backed 99.9% uptime guarantee and their data centers are secured by powerful security infrastructure and processes. While this is true, the architectural and functional characteristics of Microsoft 365 expose your tenancy to compromise and data loss as a result of human error, programmatic faults, hostile insider activity, phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks, none of which are protected by the 99.9% guarantee.
Microsoft also uses a shared responsibility model, in which the vendor (Microsoft) is responsible for application availability and all that is involved, while the customer (you) is responsible for application data, administration and user management, and security configuration.
Furthermore, unless you upgrade to the latest subscription models, you won't be able to use your Microsoft 365 and Office 365 services if your organization utilizes an earlier version of Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft will remove outdated Outlook clients from Microsoft 365 services in November. That's why, to keep your Microsoft 365 email, accounts, and data safe and secure, you'll need a third-party SaaS backup service like Aspire.
Aspire Backup for Microsoft 365 is an automatic backup and recovery solution for businesses that protects data against human mistakes, malevolent insiders, malware and ransomware, hackers, unauthorized deletion, and programming errors. Your sensitive Microsoft 365 data will always be fully backed up and recoverable thanks to Aspire's limitless storage capacity and unrestricted retention policy guarantee. Your sensitive Microsoft 365 data will always be fully backed up and recoverable thanks to Aspire's limitless storage capacity and unrestricted retention policy guarantee.
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