In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations face constant cybersecurity threats that can jeopardize sensitive data and operations. Fortunately, Microsoft offers a suite of powerful security solutions to help protect your organization. In a recent webinar, experts from Difenda and Microsoft came together to discuss how to maximize your Microsoft security investments and bolster your cybersecurity posture.
In this blog post, we’ll provide a recap of the key insights and strategies shared during the webinar.
Key Takeaways
- Your Microsoft license is more than just a software package; it’s a treasure trove of security tools. Understanding and optimizing these components can significantly enhance your security posture without requiring additional investment.
- With solutions like Defender for Identity, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft provides a multi-layered defence strategy that’s essential in today’s threat landscape.
- Don’t just adopt Sentinel; put its automation features to the test. Difenda can customize your Sentinel automation for expert threat detection, incident response, and even routine security tasks. This can free up valuable human resources and enhance the efficiency of your security team.
- Microsoft’s Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel are your allies in gaining visibility into your cloud infrastructure. Overcome staffing shortages with strategies such as automation and augmenting your processes with Difenda to bridge the skills gap and ensure robust cloud security.
- Deep dive into Difenda’s 4-step MXDR process: Threat Profiling, Threat Detection, Threat Hunting and Threat Response.
- Watch Difenda In Action: Difenda And Microsoft Join Forces To Reduce Alerts For The City Of Brampton
Understanding the Landscape
Today, cybersecurity is a top priority for organizations worldwide. The global pandemic not only accelerated digital transformation but also ushered in a new era of cyber threats. Threat actors have become more cunning and resourceful. This shift in the threat landscape has brought forth what Microsoft calls the “democratization of cyber attackers. This new era of cybersecurity features:
- Nation-State Actors: Nation-state entities have become major players in the cybersecurity arena. They’ve not only grown in sophistication but also begun sharing their tools, intensifying the threat landscape.
- Cloud Transition: With organizations embracing cloud technologies to support remote and flexible work arrangements, the attack surface has expanded. Attackers are now targeting endpoints and users who may not prioritize security.
- Ransomware Surge: Ransomware attacks have seen a sharp increase, with attackers using advanced tactics, including phishing campaigns and dark web tools, making it harder for users to distinguish threats.
- Defensive Challenges: Balancing robust security with operational efficiency is a daunting task. Modern security solutions are intricate, complicating the detection and response to threats.
Due to these added challenges, identifying incoming attacks has grown increasingly challenging for users, while IT organizations like yours face mounting difficulties in maintaining the necessary security measures. Striking the right balance in our security stack, comprehensively assessing threats, and formulating effective responses have become a formidable task.
Why Customers Are Leveraging Microsoft’s Comprehensive Security Stack
Throughout recent history, organizations traditionally relied on specific vendors for email, endpoint, and cloud security. However, integrating the alerts and signals from these disparate solutions into a cohesive cybersecurity strategy proved cumbersome. These tools often didn’t communicate with each other, necessitating the use of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) integrations. Even then, investigators had to navigate multiple portals, leading to delays in identifying and responding to threats.
Recognizing these challenges, Microsoft adopted a platform approach to cybersecurity. This approach unifies various security tools, enabling seamless communication and cooperation among them. This integrated ecosystem ensures that alerts and signals are correlated, providing a comprehensive view of security incidents. With this cohesive approach, organizations can respond more effectively, reducing the dwell time of threats within their environments.
Microsoft’s platform approach allows Microsoft to develop threat intelligence databases that highlight malicious actors, their tactics, and the vulnerabilities they exploit. These insights are then applied to protect Microsoft’s ecosystem and, more importantly, shared with organizations to fortify their defences.
Microsoft empowers businesses with the tools and technology needed to respond swiftly to evolving threats.
Harness the Full Value of Your Microsoft License
Your Microsoft license is a valuable asset, offering a range of tools and capabilities to bolster your cybersecurity efforts. It’s essential to take the time to understand the breadth of services included in your license and how they can be maximized to protect your organization. Microsoft’s suite of security tools is vast, encompassing everything from endpoint security to identity protection. By diving deep into your license and leveraging the right components, you can significantly enhance your security posture.
Native Customization and Integrations For Streamlined Security
Microsoft’s native integrations play a pivotal role in elevating your organization’s cybersecurity posture. These built-in capabilities empower you to harness the full potential of Microsoft’s security tools seamlessly and efficiently.
Here’s how Microsoft’s native integrations bolster your security strategy:
- Automatic Data Flow: Microsoft’s suite of security tools, including Defender for Office 365 and Azure Sentinel, are designed to work cohesively. They automatically share critical security data, ensuring a continuous flow of information.
- 360-Degree Visibility: Native integrations provide a holistic view of your security landscape. You can effortlessly track alerts and signals across your Microsoft 365 environment, from email protection to endpoint security and beyond.
- Streamlined Incident Management: When a security incident occurs, Microsoft’s native integrations automatically correlate related alerts. This correlation streamlines incident management, enabling you to understand the incident’s scope and impact quickly.
- User-Centric Insights: With user-profiles and anomaly detection, these integrations allow you to focus on user behaviour. Identify potential threats by monitoring deviations from normal user activities and swiftly take action to protect your environment.
- Rapid Response: Integration with Microsoft Sentinel, a powerful SIEM tool, facilitates rapid response to security incidents. Pre-defined playbooks can automatically trigger actions to mitigate threats, reducing response times from days to hours or minutes.
- Proactive Vulnerability Management: Microsoft’s native integrations extend beyond incident response. They enable proactive vulnerability identification by triggering playbooks when specific vulnerabilities or attack patterns are detected.
By harnessing Microsoft’s native integrations, your organization can streamline security operations, minimize manual tasks, and optimize threat detection and response. This unified approach ensures that your security tools work harmoniously, helping you stay ahead of evolving cyber threats and safeguard your digital assets effectively.
What This Means for Customers as Their Business Evolves
Navigating the intricate landscape of Microsoft’s security offerings, especially within the E5 portfolio, has been a challenge for many organizations. As businesses evolve, they often find themselves asking how to effectively build and consolidate these tools. The complexity of Microsoft licensing can make this journey daunting.
To help scale security as businesses grow Microsoft and Difenda have aligned to optimize your licensing and technology strategy
- Microsoft’s Strategy: Microsoft acknowledges the need to streamline costs and simplify integration. They are introducing point solutions within Azure, allowing organizations to tailor their security stack to their evolving needs.
- Comprehensive Licensing: Microsoft offers the Microsoft 365 E5 security and compliance bundle, consolidating security, compliance, data protection, productivity, and telephony into a single license. This approach simplifies management and cost control as more tools are added.
- Customizable Security Roadmap: Businesses can create a roadmap that aligns with your specific requirements and meets you wherever you are on your journey. For example, they can start with Defender for Collaboration and later add Defender for Identity and Defender for Endpoints as their security demands grow. For more information: Difenda’s End-To-End Security Roadmap.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Organizations can proactively map out their TCO with their chosen vendors, outlining a strategic roadmap for tool adoption. This helps ensure that expanding the security stack remains cost-effective.
Maximizing Microsoft Investments
For many organizations, Microsoft’s security stack forms the foundation of their security infrastructure. Whether you’re just beginning your journey or optimizing your existing stack, there are numerous ways to extract the most value from Microsoft’s offerings with Difenda.
Shared Success Stories: Microsoft, Difenda and The City of Brampton
Our partnership with the City of Brampton showcases the power of collaboration and the impact it can have on an organization’s security journey. Here’s a glimpse into how we’ve helped the City of Brampton optimize their security efforts:
Teaming up with Difenda, the city adopted a data-driven cybersecurity approach, resulting in a 70% reduction in security alerts. This milestone underscores the power of strategic partnerships and cutting-edge technology.
Our success with the City of Brampton demonstrates our commitment to providing tailored solutions and guidance to our clients. We focus on empowering organizations to achieve their security goals effectively.
Difenda’s 4-step MXDR Approach
Our approach to Managed Extended Detection and Response (MXDR) revolves around four key pillars:
- Threat Profiling: The first step is understanding your organization’s assets. We work with you to identify and classify the assets you need to protect. This includes users, servers, and more. Providing us with the business context of your data and assets is crucial. By tagging this information and sharing it with us, we can incorporate it into our playbooks and response processes, ensuring a tailored approach to your security.
- Threat Defense: Staying ahead of threats is essential. We leverage Microsoft tools like Defender for Identity, Defender for Office, Defender for Endpoint, and Microsoft Sentinel to detect anomalous behaviour. Additionally, we can pull in data from your non-Microsoft tools and apply additional analytic rules to detect threats effectively.
- Threat Hunting: Our threat intelligence and threat hunting teams combine their expertise to identify potential threats to your organization. By searching for these threats in your environment before they become major issues, we take a proactive approach to security.
- Threat Response: We also focus on how to respond effectively. Our goal is to help your organization mitigate or fully remediate security issues as they arise. With a well-defined response plan, we can take swift action to protect your assets.
Difenda’s MXDR approach is designed to provide comprehensive security coverage while also ensuring that our strategies align with your business needs and priorities. With these four pillars as the foundation, we build a robust security framework to safeguard your organization’s digital assets.
Difenda MXDR Demo
During the webinar, the Difenda team walked through 2 security scenarios to showcase how you can better leverage your Microsoft Security Investment with different technology and tools. Specifically, the team showcased Defender for Identity capabilities with unauthorized user access and Defender for Office 365 with a phishing simulation. The team also highlighted how Difenda can layer onto your security environment to help save you time, resources and ensure 24/7/365 coverage.