E-mail Security and Office 365
Okay, so you’ve moved to Office365, but did you bring your security with you? Many organizations are under the impression that because Microsoft can stop a few e-mails and tag them as Spam or malicious that it includes e-mail security. Unfortunately, that is not the case!
Successful Phishing attacks, Business E-mail Compromise and Macro infected office docs are becoming increasingly successful thanks to multitude of companies who have moved to O365. This is exacerbated by the fact that most companies are relying Microsoft to provide email security for them.
Admittedly, I was as excited as anyone to pawn off my Exchange patching, mailbox size management, and other mail store issues to Microsoft. I’ve never looked back either. Even when O365 has an outage, I feel like at least I’m not the one staying late to figure out why it’s not working. That being said, once we converted to O365 it only took me a few days to notice the increase of malicious e-mail being delivered to my inbox.
At Productive Corp every single employee drinks the security Kool-Aid. We train on it, we discuss it, we share interesting new attack attempts with each other. If something does make it through our security, it’s getting shouted out as bad, so nobody falls for it. If your organization works like this, stop reading now, grab a Diet Dr. Pepper (or favorite beverage), and move on to your next task.
However, if you have a bunch of Clicky Clickersons in your organization and those e-mails are coming through, then get 2 Diet Dr Peppers because you have some potentially long nights ahead of you.
To be fair, Microsoft isn’t promising security and they aren’t delivering it either. The question is, what should you do? Cloud Managed E-mail Security is one thing to look at. There are several options that go beyond SPAM and attachment filtering. They can include sandboxing, BEC detection, Anti-Ransomware, URL Link Verification, and a ton of other stuff. There are several ways to improve your email security posture. Give us a call and let’s figure it out together.
Backing up Office 365
Adding third party email security into O365 is a great way to improve your overall security, but it isn’t the only area to address. Data backup also needs to be part of your plan. The fact is, that even though the data is in the cloud, it still needs to be backed up as cloud providers do not keep your data forever (read on)
Our own story here was when one of our guys first came to me and said, “I’m missing e-mails”. We did some due diligence and some extensive searching to see if it had been deleted or moved to a subfolder accidentally. Through these efforts we figured out that probably a dozen or more e-mails had just disappeared. I opened a ticket and got a prompt call back.
The instructions were to do a forensic recovery, but for it to be successful we needed hard data on the e-mail, preferably an exact subject line. And if we had that, which we only did for a few e-mails we would be able to recover those after an exhaustive scan of the mailbox, which took about 4 hours.
A four to eight hour recovery time did not meet our RTO. So much like bringing our e-mail security with us, we also brought our backup solution with us. This gives us the ability to backup our data either to another cloud, or locally. We chose local because we already had plenty of storage space, and we have regained our ability to restore individual mail messages as well as full mailboxes.
If you have compliance, this is a requirement. Even if you don’t, this is the best way to ensure e-mail continuity in case of data loss that goes beyond an employee accidentally deleting something. You may have to wait to get budget, but don’t wait to get educated! Call us today if we can help.
Office 365 and Compliance: You need Archiving
We have had several inquiries for backing up Cloud based e-mail for O365 and G-Suite. After some investigation we uncovered that what the client really needed for compliance was e-mail archiving. Now, this is something that you can get with specific levels of O365. You might be thinking, if you can get archiving from Microsoft and Google, why are people buying third party solutions? The most common reason is usability.
We have several solutions for archiving, and much of the time these solutions win out because of ease of use and searchability. Some want to backup and archive with a vendor other than their cloud email provider Some customers need to archive e-mail in a different cloud from where e-mail is stored.
These are areas that we can help with. Contact us to discuss your needs and we can help you determine if you need backup and archiving or if just one of these categories gets you what you need.