Your Cloud Security Journey: 4 Steps to Protect Your Business
A common motivator for enterprises looking into migrating their IT systems and applications to the cloud is the idea that the security of those systems becomes someone else’s problem.
This idea is not quite true. Although your cloud service or third-party providers can make better security tools available to monitor and protect your IT environment in the cloud, it’s up to you to configure and use those tools. Cloud security is still very much your problem.
The good news is that your cloud security journey can be easier to manage than on-premise IT security. The 360 Visibility Cloud Security Team has developed a four-step program to analyze your cloud security posture, identify vulnerabilities, and close the gaps to harden your systems against all types of cyber threats using Microsoft 365 security solutions. The four steps are:
- Learn
- See
- Try
- Secure
Cloud Security Journey Steps
Step 1: Learn
The first step is to learn about the various Microsoft 365 security solutions and how they can help with different cloud security aspects. These products include:
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Protects Office 365 applications.
- Microsoft Defender for Identity: Helps your security operations team protect on-premise identities.
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: Provides device protection for desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices, including Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms.
- Microsoft Cloud App Security: Identifies and combats threats across all of your cloud-based services.
- Microsoft Secure Score: Provides tools to assess your current security setup and identify the most important issues that need attention.
- Microsoft Intune: Implements a comprehensive IT service delivery and management solution for your mobile device ecosystem.
Once you understand each solution’s purpose and capabilities, you can start thinking about what set of cloud security tools makes sense for your enterprise environment.
Step 2: See
This step provides you with a closer look at how 360 Visibility can help improve your cloud security stance by implementing a no-risk trial of the Microsoft 365 security solutions in your environment. This trial makes no changes to your existing network or application configurations.
In this step, you have access to security assessment reports for your most important infrastructure systems:
- Office 365 applications
- Active Directory
- Microsoft Exchange
When you see what Microsoft 365 security solutions can do on a trial basis, you’re ready for more comprehensive system testing.
Step 3: Test
In this step, you implement the chosen cloud security solutions on test devices and services. At this point, actual configurations are made in the test environment to take full advantage of the solution set. This gives you hands-on experience with the tools in implementing Microsoft’s recommended Zero Trust security model.
The Zero Trust model’s philosophy is that every access attempt is a potential breach until proven otherwise. Older security models operated on the assumption that access from inside the “perimeter” could be assumed to be legitimate. Still, hard experience has taught us that this is a poor assumption. With Zero Trust, every access, no matter the source, is authenticated and encrypted, using the principle of least privileges to prevent unnecessary access.
The Test step enables you to try out this model in a “real-world” environment to ensure the product mix, system design, and configurations are appropriate for your environment.
Step 4: Secure
The final step starts with implementing cloud security solutions in your production environment. It launches the monthly 360 Visibility subscription for active management from our seasoned team of cloud security professionals. The monthly subscription reduces the burden on your in-house IT security team with numerous benefits, including:
- Periodic configuration review and management using best practices
- Continuous improvement of your cloud security stance
- Reporting to your IT leadership for total transparency into your cloud security situation
- Periodic initial and refresher IT security training for your end-users
Your Cloud Security Journey
Your IT environment is not more secure simply because you’ve migrated it to the cloud. It still requires constant vigilance, effective training, and disciplined users to keep your systems and data safe, both at rest and in transit, from bad actors both inside and outside the organization.
To achieve robust security for your cloud environment, you have to take the first step. A major breach can cost your business millions of dollars and a tarnished reputation. Many businesses are unable to recover from that kind of damage. Contact 360 Visibility today to learn more about your journey to better cloud security with our Monthly Cloud Security Administration Service.
