Although the benefits for employers and employees are real: more productive employees, more access to data whenever / wherever is needed, business cost savings in both equipment and time managing IT; there is the concern of how to minimize risks and protect confidential information from leaking outside of the organization.
When employees use their personally owned devices for work they can accidentally leak information by forwarding a private company-only email, or worse confidential company data can be accessed by hackers while the device is connected to an open WIFI network. According to a Verizon data breach investigation report, 75 percent of network intrusions used weak or stolen credentials to gain access.
Although it is important to have the right BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy in place, there is still the chance for mistakes. Studies have found that as much as 90 percent of users admit to not following security policies. What this means for your business is that a lot of confidential data like customers’ personally identifiable information, such as in healthcare, retail or financial institutions, or confidential company information, such as trade secrets, company financials, or employee records could be at risk.
With so many data available, traditional company firewalls and perimeter solutions no longer suffice to protect confidential information wherever it lives. Today, until recently many small businesses were cobbling together some solutions to attempt to solve this problem. However, none tied it all together until now.
Comprehensive solutions have been developed that protect information assets across four layers: user identity, content, applications & cloud services, and devices. When combined with cloud application like Microsoft Office 365, they offer protection for applications and services your customers use every day.
One particular solution from Microsoft not only is flexible and easy to integrate, but it also provides enterprise-grade security for small businesses at about half the cost of competitive solutions. Key security features include:
- Threat detection: Detect abnormal user behavior, suspicious activities, known malicious attacks and security issues right away.
- Conditional access: Control access to applications and other corporate resources like email and files with policy-based conditions that evaluate criteria such as device health, user location, etc.
- Single sign-on: Sign in once to cloud and on-premises web apps from any device. Pre-integrated support for Salesforce, Concur, Workday, and thousands more popular SaaS apps.
