You’ve taken the leap and deployed to Office 365 Exchange and with your email server now hosted in the cloud, you no longer have to worry about on-premises server hardware and cost to upgrade security and software. But, all technology leaps have pros and cons…
Office 365 Email Security
While Microsoft® Office 365™ provides great benefits to your organization, email systems remain one of the weakest links when it comes to data security and malicious attacks. The reality is, your Office 365 email security features can’t fully mitigate all the threats facing your business today. What’s more, by moving to the cloud, you can no longer rely on the point solutions deployed to fortify your on-premises email systems. For superior Office 365 security, you need approaches that are purpose-built for the cloud.
Office 365’s Exchange Online Protection (EOP) addresses a number of security concerns and includes protection against spam, malware and suspicious attachments, but it is not sufficient to withstand specifically-targeted phishing and whaling attacks, malicious links and other unprecedented cyber crimes.
The security gap is therefore wide enough to warrant an additional third-party security gateway like Mimecast to locate weak points and ensure a multi-layered secure environment.
Continuity Challenge
When it comes to business continuity, Office 365 is also not solid. Email downtime can cripple your business and uninterrupted access to live and historic email and attachments is only possible with a third-party solution. A third-party archiving solution eliminates the Office 365 limitation by storing data in two different infrastructures. Thus, allowing users to access their archived content and send and receive emails as part of a business continuity solution when Office 365 outages occur.
Enhance Office 365 security base with third-party services
Research states that 40% of Office 365 environments already rely on third-party tools to provide the required level of security, and by 2020, this number will increase to 50%.
When choosing solutions to enhance Office 365 security, it is imperative to find a comprehensive service with proper archiving and a robust backup and recovery solutions. Not all third-party security systems perform the same.
Look for the following key areas:
- Protection against malicious URL’s (on all devices)
- Protection against impersonation attacks by scanning of all inbound mails and clearly marking suspicious emails
- A layered defence against malicious attachments with multiple anti-virus checks against known malware
- Sandboxing of attachments to protect against unknown malware
- Endpoint Protection that prevents threats from reaching devices’ and stops them before they run. Detecting threats that have managed to bypass all other controls and blocks and reverses any ransomware and abnormal activity.
Contact ENHALO for Sophos Intercept X and Mimecast email and continuity third-party solutions to address Office 365 Security Gaps and safeguard your business.
