3 Ways to Enhance Your Cloud and Email Security in MSFT 365

Many dealers we talk with are using Microsoft 365 with Defender for Cloud and Email security. But in our experience, there are 3 ways to enhance your cloud and email security beyond what is "out-of-the-box" from Microsoft.

Enhancement 1: Improve The Protection from Phishing Attacks

Enhanced email security with advanced threat prevention mitigates today’s risks by constantly evolving. Let’s look at a study that examined over 300 million emails that proves this out:

In Microsoft’s case, specifically not using AI to identify phishing attempts allows emails to get through to user inboxes that pretend to be notifications from well-known apps. As an example, MSFT Defender missed this email pretending to be a request for a Zoom call. However, the Zoom meeting ID is static, and the embedded link is malicious.

Microsoft's email security tools, while a good baseline misses more advanced phishing techniques. By augmenting MSFT with better email protection, dealer IT managers can substantially improve the way they catch malicious emails.

Enhancement 2: Improve SEG with Enhanced Email Protection

Another approach we see is adding a Secure Email Gateway (SEG) to MSFT E5 and Defender. This approach, however, misses internal emails by only protecting inbound emails from the outside. Additionally, SEGs have no way of detecting compromised accounts. Lastly, SEGs struggle with cloud email with its man-in-the-middle architecture as can be seen in the following diagrams:

The Better Way includes a layer of inline prevention that catches malicious emails via API before they get to the end user’s inbox. This architecture protects all emails both internal and external and "levels-up" email protection. Additionally, be analyzing emails in real-time along leveraging AI and machine learning integrated with devices enhanced email protection can ensure unified protection across all connected devices.

Overall, supplementing MSFT’s email protection with only a SEG, misses the opportunity to monitor internal email as well. This is just as important to protect the email environment.

Enhancement 3: Enhancing Cloud Security with Better Protection

From a security perspective, the data that sits under cloud-based Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint can be vulnerable. While MSFT provides Teams and OneDrive Data loss prevention with higher licensing, it doesn’t provide advance real-time monitoring or analytics to prevent data breaches.

Additionally, while MSFT 365 E5 has security controls and policy enforcement, adding automated workflows for incident response is key feature to support the sprawling IT environments dealer IT teams manage. Lastly, while MSFT comes with security updates and configuration options, it lacks proactive threat hunting tools for cloud and email environments.

Dealer IT managers need better tools that simplify the management of security for Microsoft’s cloud environment. Additionally, enhancing what MSFT Defender for Cloud offerings provide, delivers more comprehensive IT security.

Overall Takeaway

For Dealers, Microsoft 365 Defender for Office there are areas that the security can be enhanced. For dealers that want a more comprehensive approach towards protecting their IT environments there are ways to augment MSFT's Cloud and Email security to deliver a better security stance and reduce cybersecurity risk. Ask for a demo of Sedona Safeguard Cloud and Email Protection to find our more.