Microsoft Ignite 2020: Vasu Jakkal on Security, Compliance, and Identity
Gain insight into data protection with our webinar “Protecting Sensitive Data in Office 365 at the Team and Data Levels.“
Read our other Microsoft Ignite 2020 session recaps below:
- Satya Nadella on Building Digital Resilience
- Microsoft Teams Q&A w/Jeff Teper
- Jared Spataro on Microsoft Teams & The Future of Work
- 5 New Features Coming to Microsoft Teams Admin Center
- What’s New in Microsoft Teams Security and Compliance
Microsoft Ignite 2020 kicked off Tuesday, Sep. 22 coming to us live wherever we call our office these days. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will impact our workplace and working styles for generations to come. That’s why a huge theme throughout Ignite sessions this year was “digital resilience.”
With a rapidly evolving tech landscape and exponential increase of personal device usage, zero trust principles in security are becoming a higher priority for businesses than ever before. First and foremost, digital security is about people and empowering the defense of data, safety, and building resilience. On the frontlines of cybercrime, Microsoft knows that being safe and feeling safe is what empowers people to do more, create more, and trust more in technology.
Vasu Jakkal, a CVP at Microsoft, hosted this session highlighting the three biggest components needed to achieve resilience in this new digital world. She emphasized Microsoft’s mission to empower us all on our own respective missions.
Security
Andrew Conway in Security Marketing at Microsoft led this segment on the security component of building resilience. With Microsoft’s newest releases, IT professionals can focus more on mitigating threats and spend less time trying to scale and integrate. In a unique approach to modernizing security operations, SIEM and XDR now work together, powered by the cloud, to bring us Microsoft Defender.
Prioritizing integration and simplification, here are some of the benefits of utilizing Microsoft Defender:
- New behavioral analytics to detect unknown threats
- Complete support for all major platforms, including Android
- Sentinel has built-in cybersecurity
Microsoft promoted a special offer to save up to $1,500 on a 3,500-seat deployment in November.
Check out this article on Microsoft's digital resilience push: Click To TweetCompliance
Alym Rayani in Compliance Marketing spoke on the importance of compliance and how it relates to data loss prevention in Microsoft 365. Compliance cloud solutions help companies find insider threats and deal with potential legal issues. With the increase in remote work, users are now creating, storing, and sharing data in new ways which creates new challenges in protecting sensitive information.
Available now, Microsoft Compliance Manager is a new solution to help reduce risk and ensure compliance with global regulations. All controlled from a handy dashboard, here are some key takeaways:
- Recommended improvement actions and risk-based score
- Support for 150+ out-of-the-box assessments for global standards and regulations
- Built-in customizations, APIs, and pre-built data connectors give users ultimate control over
Identity
With the push to give individuals more control over their PII, Irina Nechaeva in Identity Marketing speaks to the importance of identity in the final segment of this session.
“A strong cloud identity is the first step to zero trust,” says Nechaeva.
Again, with the increase in remote work, practices like multi-factor authentication and single identity platforms allow end-users more flexibility in connecting to colleagues internally or externally all while protecting and governing access.
Microsoft is a trusted industry leader in cloud identity with over 200,000 organizations using Azure ID. Ever-evolving to meet security and user needs, here are the latest updates:
- Unified pricing and security features for external identities
- Header-based authentication in Azure ID Application Proxy
- Deep app integrations for user lifecycle
- Conditional access and identity protection enhancements
Coming soon are even more ways to protect PII. Microsoft invested in a decentralized model where users can securely store information like credit score, date of birth, job status, and more in an app like Microsoft Authenticator to prevent third-party apps from misusing or unnecessarily accessing personal data without permission.
Vasu brought this Microsoft Ignite 2020 session to a close by spotlighting two companies’ stories of empowering their workforce through the various transitions in the workplace during the global pandemic. Century Link and The Little Potato Company invested in solutions for remote work and security controls to increase resilience in their businesses.
My key takeaways from this session were:
- Companies need to invest in secure cloud-based solutions that automatically reduce the burden on IT and empower end-users to have more control
- The increase in remote work globally requires more controls and customization in compliance enforcement
- Allowing users more control over their cloud identity increases trust in technology and empowers users to do more
Microsoft knows digital safety is paramount to productivity and peace of mind, which is why they are constantly reimagining security, compliance, and identity to protect and empower their users to thrive. They continue to lead by example when it comes to inspiring users to achieve resilience with actionable strategies to protect now AND in the future.
