No matter how large or small your organization is, cybercrimes are on the rise due to their cheap, fast, and highly profitable nature. Damage is significant and can cost organizations millions. Besides financial costs, cybercrimes can also hurt reputations and ability to do business, as well as compromise the physical health of your employees, patients, customers, and others. Cybersecurity builds trust, and when people do not feel that their information is being properly secured and kept private, they begin to lose trust in the brand, product, and services.

Understanding the entire organization environment through assessing your existing setup, weak links, and major vulnerabilities and gaps can prevent these incidents from happening. User identity now protect billions points of data.

This is the data we transmit at work, IoT devices such as coffeemakers and printers, and our personal information as more of our data is becoming digitized. Securing identities help reduce the risk of cybercrimes to organizations and individuals alike.

As you grow, evolve, and merge over time, your networks and systems naturally get more complex and things may slip through the cracks. You might want to think about patch management to ensure changes in code are verified and tested or making sure all application and operating system portfolios are current so that cybercriminals aren’t able to exploit system weaknesses.

Additionally, end users and their passwords can often be the weakest link in organization security and that requires organizations to put in robust security and compliance protection in place. When a proper security approach is implemented, it can help your organization maintain a more secure and private work environment.

Servers are hosts to some of the most sensitive information in an organization. That is why they are frequently targeted by cybercriminals looking to exploit weaknesses in server security for financial or data gain. Servers sit at the heart of an organization’s IT infrastructure and allow large numbers of users to access the same information or functionality, often remotely. Generally, they are used to run email systems, power the internet, and host files. However, the problem is that something as simple as a weak password, missing antivirus software, or user phishing link click could expose the business to substantial loss.

The first step to enabling remote access is to start with identity. Our current reality is a highly dispersed remote workforce, and now more than ever, identity is your control plane to have greater visibility and control over who has access, when they should have it, and under what conditions. With Azure Active Directory, Microsoft’s cloud-based IAM solution, you can enable single sign-on (SSO) so that users have access to all critical productivity applications.

Spam, malware, and phishing attacks are always lurking as embedded links in emails, pop-ups and more. However, your company can take very basic protection action to combat against these harmful threats. Transport Rules are a great way of enabling customizable protection such as labelling emails as ‘external’ from users outside the tenant and blocking auto-forward rules, a common attack from malicious actors. DNS configuration helps other systems determine whether the content of your message has been tampered or if emails from your domain are safe, which is vital to ensuring emails are delivered to the correct location, including avoiding spam filters.