Microsoft 365 Security
What is Microsoft 365 Security?
Microsoft 365 Security refers to a comprehensive set of tools, features, and capabilities designed to safeguard your environment, user accounts, and data against ever-evolving cyber threats and malicious activities.
By enhancing protection and mitigating risks, Microsoft 365 Security strengthens your defenses and helps your organization meet legal and industry compliance standards. This ensures you can handle regulatory requirements while staying secure.
Why is Security Important for Microsoft 365?
Microsoft controls nearly half of the global office suite market, with over 1.3 million companies in the U.S. alone using Microsoft 365. This popularity pushes Microsoft to adapt quickly to evolving customer compliance and security demands. Simultaneously, this extensive user base makes Microsoft 365 a prime target for cyberattacks.
Microsoft is committed to complying with various regulations. The company provides a wide range of compliance and security tools to help organizations protect against cyber threats, safeguard their data and integrity, and comply with various regulations and standards. But is Microsoft 365 secure?
Microsoft operates under the “Shared Responsibility” model, where security obligations are shared between the user and Microsoft, depending on the deployment type (on-premise, cloud, and hybrid) and the service model (Software-, Platform-, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service). However, Microsoft clearly outlines the areas that remain the user’s responsibility across all services and deployments—data protection, endpoint security, account management, and access control—encouraging users to take an active role in safeguarding their environments.
This means that while Microsoft provides tools for data compliance, privacy, and security, only users are accountable for ensuring these solutions are sufficient to meet their specific security needs and protect their environment adequately.
NOTE. Microsoft offers tools for information protection and data loss prevention in Purview and Defender portals. In 2024, Microsoft also released a dedicated Microsoft 365 Backup solution for Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive data. However, these tools have limited functionality. To get complete control of your Microsoft 365 data, you need a comprehensive third-party backup solution like NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
Key Components of Microsoft 365 Security
Navigating through all Microsoft 365 Security tools and services isn’t easy. Firstly, features may evolve into tools and solutions, and their names may change. Secondly, they vary depending on your Microsoft 365 plan and deployment type.
To better understand the variety of tools and the connections between them, we can group main Microsoft solutions into a few categories:
- Identity and Access Management (IAM). Hybrid work and hybrid environments make IAM more challenging for administrators who need to maintain secure remote access to all organization’s resources, including emails, data, and applications. IAM services enable admins to verify a user’s identity, set multi-factor authentication (MFA), and configure necessary access permissions. Microsoft has built-in IAM features and delivers a dedicated IAM solution, Microsoft Entra ID.
- Threat Protection. Microsoft provides a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity designed to safeguard both on-premises and cloud environments. Microsoft 365 threat protection includes two core solutions:
- Microsoft Defender XDR (formerly known as Microsoft 365 Defender), where the “XDR” stands for eXtended Detection and Response, is a comprehensive cloud-based portal from which you can access most Microsoft security tools.
- Microsoft Sentinel is a security information and event management service (SIEM) designed to collect and analyze event log data from various sources within the organization’s network.
Additionally, Microsoft introduced an AI-powered assistant, Copilot, to enhance threat detection and incident response.
- Data Governance and Compliance. This is represented by Microsoft Purview tools, including Compliance Manager, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and eDiscovery.
Microsoft Defender XDR: Risk detection and mitigation
The Defender XDR is a comprehensive security portal that combines almost all Microsoft threat management and response features. The Defender’s key components include:
- Entra ID Protection enables organizations to granularly manage user identities, detect vulnerabilities, and automatically respond to suspicious sign-ins.
- Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is a filtering service that protects the organization’s emails against spam, phishing attempts, and malware. EOP is a foundational layer for Microsoft 365 email security inside the Microsoft infrastructure.
- Defender for Office 365 (formerly Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection) helps detect and mitigate phishing and malware attacks in real time. The solution’s capabilities include anti-phishing protection and detection of malicious attachments across emails, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. Higher-tier plans offer additional features like attack simulations and automated investigation.
- Defender for Cloud Apps. This solution focuses on cloud access security and app governance, automating alerts and actions for better control over app access, data sharing, and usage within a cross-SaaS environment.
- Defender for Endpoint is a key tool for managing endpoint security, which allows organizations to analyze device vulnerabilities, automate investigation and remediation, and reduce the attack surface. This tool can integrate with Defender for IoT to cover connected devices.
Administrators can also enable behavioral Microsoft 365 protection with endpoint detection and response (EDR) and further enhance EDR capabilities with Defender Vulnerability Management. This allows them to gain visibility into the organization’s digital assets, use remediation tools, and assess breach likelihoods.
- Defender for Identity (formerly Azure Advanced Threat Protection) collects signals from Active Directory servers to detect and investigate identity-related threats in real time. This can quickly identify compromised identities and insider threats in hybrid environments.
To better understand how Defender’s tools work together to form layered security, imagine a phishing attack attempt.
- EOP and Defender for Office 365 help mitigate the risk of receiving a phishing email.
- If the email manages to get through and a user opens a malicious attachment, Defender for Endpoint can detect and prevent malware deployment on the user’s endpoint device.
- If malware targets user identity, Defender for Identity flags a suspicious sign-in.
- Defender for Cloud Apps prevents attackers from using a compromised identity to get access to the organization’s data stored in the Microsoft cloud.
Microsoft Sentinel: Centralized management of security incidents
Microsoft Sentinel combines security information and event management (SIEM) services with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technologies.
While SIEM is mainly designed for collecting and analyzing event log data from various sources, SOAR enhances threat detection by surfacing real threats through pre-configured policies, helping solve incidents faster.
When used together, Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR provide broader visibility across the entire infrastructure, where:
- Defender XDR platform helps investigate attacks, protect data against cyber threats like ransomware and phishing, and respond faster through automated remediation.
- Sentinel SIEM platform helps manage cybersecurity from a unified dashboard, allowing organizations to collect and analyze data related to specific security incidents and events.
Microsoft Purview: Data compliance and governance
Microsoft Purview is a set of tools and solutions that help organizations meet regulatory requirements and improve data management and governance. Some of the key features available in the Purview portal include:
- Policy-based data encryption using custom encryption keys.
- Customer lockboxes to ensure that Microsoft personnel can’t access customer data without receiving the organization’s approval.
- Log audits for compliance and legal investigations. Premium plan, formerly known as Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit, allows log retention for up to a year and offers customizable retention policies for audit records related to user activities.
- eDiscovery supports end-to-end workflows for retaining, analyzing, and exporting content required for internal and external investigations.
- Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (Endpoint DLP) detects and alerts about suspicious or unwanted data activities like unintentional oversharing of sensitive data.
- Insider Risk Management helps monitor and manage suspicious user activity that can potentially violate regulations or internal policies, identifying potential security threats within the organization.
- Compliance Manager offers prebuilt assessment for common standards and regulations, providing step-by-step guidance and generating a risk-based compliance score to help organizations track regulatory compliance.
- Information barriers are the policies organizations can set to restrict communication, content lookups, and discovery between specific users or groups.
- Information Protection allows organizations to label sensitive content, such as documents, groups, emails, and sites, through both admin and policy-based configurations.
- Data Classification Analytics uses tools like Content Explorer and Activity Explorer to monitor sensitive data. Content Explorer indexes and filters sensitive data by label and sensitivity type, while Activity Explorer highlights user activities like label editing or sharing that could potentially expose sensitive data to risk.
- Data Lifecycle/Records Management (formerly Microsoft Information Governance) helps organizations configure retention policies and labels to ensure compliance with regulatory data retention, archiving, and deletion requirements.
How to Implement a Strong Security Strategy in Microsoft 365
With a wide range of security tools spread across different plans and solutions, building a strong security strategy in Microsoft 365 can be challenging. Below are key areas to focus on.
Assess security needs
While having access to all Office 365 security tools may seem beneficial, advanced plans can be costly. Moreover, managing multiple security tools increases administrative workload and the risk of errors, making it essential to balance security requirements with budget and operational efficiency.
A well-rounded security strategy should be tailored to your organization’s specific needs and financial constraints. Assess your security needs and focus on deploying the necessary tools to avoid overwhelming your IT team with excessive management complexity.
Deploy Zero-Trust
The Zero-Trust security model requires admins to implement the “never trust, always verify” approach and assume that any request, particularly those from untrusted or uncontrolled networks, may pose a security threat. By verifying every access request, organizations can minimize the risk of unauthorized access and breaches.
Set up multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Implementing MFA adds an extra layer of Microsoft 365 protection against identity theft by requiring users to verify their identity before accessing the network. MFA significantly enhances login security, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access due to compromised credentials.
Managing security policies
Microsoft 365 offers various security policies such as retention policies, conditional access policies, labeling policies, and encryption policies. While these tools provide granular control over data security, they require regular configuration, maintenance, and updates. Automating this process can help alleviate the administrative burden and ensure consistent management.
Continuous monitoring and improvement
Maintaining a strong security posture requires continuous monitoring and proactive improvement. Implement a patch management strategy to ensure that your environment, devices, and Microsoft 365 applications are up-to-date with the latest security patches and updates. This helps mitigate vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of cyber breaches.
How NAKIVO Enhances Microsoft 365 Security
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a dedicated Microsoft 365 backup solution for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams data. Unlike Microsoft’s native backup, which stores backups only within the Microsoft infrastructure, the NAKIVO solution allows you to store data copies in multiple locations of your choice. Supported storage options include public and private clouds, local folders, NAS, and detachable devices. Storage flexibility enables you to easily implement the 3-2-1 backup strategy, eliminating the risk of a single point of failure.
Additionally, the NAKIVO solution supports a broad range of virtual and physical platforms, centralizing your data protection activities into a single web-based dashboard. This streamlined approach provides better control and visibility over your entire infrastructure, enhancing overall security and operational efficiency.
