For almost 15 years Auxzillium has been actively managing tenants in Microsoft Azure. While AWS holds ~31% market share, Azure is the fastest growing. Organizations requiring strong levels of compliance are a major contributing factor to Azure’s growth.

For many years the world has probably associated cloud services with the likes of “Skynet” from the Terminator movie franchise – at least I did. I thought it was cool. The concern has been security and getting shut off. As you can now see, the adoption of cloud services by those in healthcare, finance, and federal government should take the edge of some of those security concerns.

 

 

 

 

While we have consistently stated no one size shoe fits all, if you’re not considering cloud services and reaching for hardware as soon as the IT budget allows, you’re doing your company a severe disservice. I had a call recently with someone who surmised the cloud was no place for his business due to security. The idea was that those in charge wouldn’t think too highly of it. He was committed to addressing the IT needs of his business with hardware. Innovation is always limited when there is a single personality responsible for it.

What can be ironic in many conversations with prospects is the fact that Microsoft 365 Exchange for Email has nearly a 70% market share, but most people never think twice about where that email is being stored. On top of that, email isn’t just messages. Emails often contain attachments and if your business isn’t guided by some sort of procedure as it relates to email usage, then that cloud-based email likely has company IP.

When it comes to security in Microsoft’s Cloud (including 365), we can imagine it carved into 2 distinct pieces. We can call one side public and the other side private. Public doesn’t mean your data is public. Only that Microsoft’s “public” side is available for use by anyone in the general public.  Anyone can setup a tenant in the public side, but the private side requires an application stating cause for need.

This leads me to another conversation I had with a client who does government work and needs to meet CMMC compliance. The thought was once they were in Microsoft’s private side; they were good to go. They thought the private side of Microsoft was like a new bank vault surrounded in concrete with 3’ cast iron doors and a biometric retina scanner. The client wasn’t aware, but that’s part of our job to explain the real differences surrounding the treatment and management of client data in one location as opposed to the other.

 

While private may sound more secure, it can be setup in a very insecure way. That means you need a company with experience to manage either side and keep your business as secure as possible. Microsoft provides an overwhelming number of controls to provide the kinds of security I’m talking about. Does your support provider know what those controls are? Has your support provider enabled them for your business?

The final element keeping your business safe in the cloud is monitoring. Microsoft has a framework that can look at your deployed resources and give you a thumbs up or down based on how they are implemented. From there, you can make changes. While that is a step in the right direction, it is passive in nature. You should have a solution in place that doesn’t just identify incongruities but actively monitors all that is happening within the ecosystem and can actively respond.

While the cloud can be a secure place to operate your business from, you need a partner like Auxzillium that can understand your company’s needs, make the best recommendations, implement, and manage them for you.