Putting security at the heart of modern businesses

Living in a digital age opens up opportunities to improve and reimagine how people live, work and learn. But being connected through a proliferation of devices, particularly as remote working continues to grow, also opens up new avenues of attack for cunning cybercriminals.   

SA has proven to be particularly vulnerable to cyberattack: the country had the third-highest number of cybercrime victims globally last year, and lost R2.2bn to these attacks. Cyber threats provide a clear material risk to both individuals and businesses, and continue to rise exponentially. 

The move to working, transacting and collaborating online will continue, and many organisations have inadequate security measures in place to handle the relentless attempts by attackers. Hackers attack every 39 seconds — the equivalent of 2,244 times a day. These attacks come with a heavy price tag, costing $3.92m per breach on average.

This indicates a need for deeper levels of investment in security, and working with the right partner to protect individuals and the business at all levels: from empowering people within the business, to engaging customers and partners, transforming products and optimising operations, and ultimately protecting data and personal information generated in the workplace. 

All of these activities need to have safety, security and trust at their core. 

Businesses cannot: 

• empower employees effectively if they can’t help ensure their safety and maintain their trust; 
• effectively engage customers if they can’t maintain their trust, safeguard their data and help ensure you use it in appropriate and compliant ways; 
• transform products if security isn’t built into the way applications are developed at every stage of the life cycle; or
• optimise operations if they're not connecting insights, data and intelligence from one system to another in secure, compliant and responsible ways.

“Protecting our customers and the wider community is a responsibility we take seriously, which is why we take a broad view of security,” says Colin Erasmus, modern workplace business group lead at Microsoft SA. 

Cybersecurity and compliance as the backbone of business

“Only by investing in strong cybersecurity and compliance as the backbone of the business can organisations maintain business continuity, meet regulatory needs, earn the trust of their customers and address cyberthreats. Having the right support and tools in place is key.” 

Microsoft is uniquely suited to help provide industry-leading protection against all major security threat vectors, including identity, e-mail, malicious and open IP because of the company’s experience, innovation and scale.

“We invest $1bn annually in security, and more than 3,500 full-time security professionals use AI tools to analyse more than eight-trillion signals daily and respond to security threats around the world, 24/7, in real time. We infuse that intelligence and insight into our connected cloud security solutions,” says Erasmus.

Microsoft’s integrated, comprehensive offering can help organisations broadly adopt the “Zero Trust” security strategy critical in today’s distributed, multiplatform, hybrid cloud technology world. It extends identity, security and compliance coverage across people, devices, apps, developer tools, data and infrastructure. 

Platforms such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Threat Protection and Azure Sentinel integrate to allow security teams to stop and manage threats for the entire hybrid estate — across clouds and multiple device platforms. 

Meeting today’s complex regulatory requirements

“Lastly, our offerings also help enable customers to meet today’s complex regulatory requirements by helping protect sensitive data, wherever it lives or travels,” says Erasmus.

Huge amounts of data are created, stored and shared everywhere now — and businesses need the right support and tools to protect this data properly according to legislation governing it. This is even more essential now that SA’s Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPIA) has come into full effect. PoPIA aims to regulate how organisations generate, store, manage, use and process personal data. 

This is where Microsoft’s Compliance Manager tool comes in, as it is now enabled to include PoPIA. It is a centralised dashboard that enables businesses to map and monitor their obligations, roles and responsibilities, and regulatory adherence to their use of Microsoft cloud services on Microsoft 365, Office 365 or Azure Active Directory. 

This mapping and laying out of roles and responsibilities to get a risk-based compliance score allows enterprises to identify where the gaps lie in meeting their compliance obligations and take action to address these gaps. It does this by giving organisations a better understanding of the activities taking place related to their data, such as data classification and flows, as well as providing a broad view of what they need to do to comply with the necessary regulations.

Watch the video below:

Ultimately, in a world where technology, security and compliance needs are diverse and ever-changing, businesses need to ensure that their entire digital world is ring-fenced by a foundation of integrated, comprehensive security — and work with a partner who is able to support them to achieve that. 

This article was paid for by Microsoft.