Microsoft recently completed a multi-billion dollar deal that may very well have slammed the door shut on the argument over who has the best public cloud offering. On July 17, 2019, MS announced a deal with AT&T that will move most of the AT&T staff to Microsoft’s suite of business productivity and security solutions, including Office 365. AT&T has stated the deal is part of its transformation to become a "public cloud-first" company, which sends a big signal to small and medium-sized businesses.
A public cloud model is scalable, reliable, and cost-effective. So why hasn’t every company made the same commitment? Some critics will point to security. While this may be true of some providers, there isn’t a more secure cloud (public or otherwise) productivity solution than MS Office 365.
Key Reasons Why MS Office 365’s Public Cloud Model Offers Advanced Threat Protection You Can Trust
Exchange Online One Drive
MS Exchange Online (available with Office 365) is a cloud-based messaging solution for businesses that provides your staff with efficient access to email, calendars, contacts, and tasks from PCs, the web, and mobile devices used in the course of doing business. From a productivity standpoint, it’s seamless to use and maintain. Exchange Online features automatic patching and permits users the opportunity to store all of their essential data in one place. Staff can access their email, calendar, and contacts from practically any browser and device from anywhere in the world as permitted by your company. But beyond productivity and control, you’re here to learn about security. You’ll be happy to know that this MS public cloud solution is secure and reliable, protecting your business from advanced threats.
Exchange Online’s anti-malware and anti-spam filtering capabilities protects against attacks and phishing schemes while ensuring full access to your email services. In addition, with cloud backups and globally redundant servers, you will have adopted an integral part of company-wide disaster recovery plan.
Microsoft Secure Score for More Security
While messaging service security is extremely important to your business, you need to make sure the other productivity solutions in Office 365 are just as secure. One hands-on approach to identifying this is MS 365’s
Secure Score.
Driven by
artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, Secure Score is an enterprise-level solution provided to SMBs subscribing to the more robust suite of Office 365 services. The feature generates a security benchmark score for your organization to help both administrators and IT personnel identify technical controls that will help protect users and sensitive company data. Secure Score also ranks your business in relation to other similar companies in your industry so that you can see where you stand in comparison.
Secure Score provides your business with a clear accounting of what action needs to be taken with respect to the security controls for Office 365 services you’ve subscribed to. Recommendations are found on the Secure Score dashboard. Your IT team will know exactly what steps to take to improve your score, and what each improvement means to overall security. The dashboard also lets users filter controls by business impact and implementation cost. The latter allows you to balance productivity against security, and budget accordingly. Another satisfying feature of Secure Score, as that within 24-48 hours of adjusting controls the score will update and you’ll see the fruits of your labor.
View more on Microsoft Secure Score
here, and learn more about how MS 365 (including Office 365) is
leading the charge in advanced threat protection.
Admittedly, the information above is just a part of what makes MS Office 365 a public cloud productivity solution you can trust. We will continue to update you on security developments, but we encourage you to contact us today to discuss what we can do for you as an MS Gold Partner and Certified Cloud Solution Provider. Tap into
our expertise so that you can leverage the power of Microsoft products and services while enjoying the cost benefits of securing your MS subscriptions through Fully Managed.