Lawk Salih, Independent Community Bankers of America, Vice President, Technology Systems and Services
“A big advantage of MS Defender is the amount of visibility it provides. When an alert comes in, you want to be able to get to your logs right away to see what’s going on.”
For us, implementing the Microsoft 365 Defender suite was part of a consolidation strategy. Consolidation was, in turn, part of our digital transformation strategies. We wanted to improve security, save money, and reduce management overhead. It was not just about consolidating vendors: It meant consolidating and centralizing all the logs generated from the endpoints and infrastructure so that we could go to one dashboard for all of our security monitoring, detection, and remediation.
When coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) hit, suddenly everyone was taking laptops home. While our devices had the endpoint protection, we could not put any kind of protection on the employee’s home routers or those similar on corporate infrastructure. For example, in the corporate environment we have access to a 24/7 security operations center known as SOC to monitor unauthorized activities on the network. We wanted to monitor the exposure level of the traffic and risk level and set alerts as necessary. Additionally, we wanted to set controls over what was and was not authorized at the endpoint. Cloud app and endpoint security tools in Microsoft 365 Defender enabled us to do that with much detailed analysis into discovered apps, total throughput, bandwidth-intensive apps, and remediation policies to protect our employees.
A big advantage of Microsoft Defender is the amount of visibility it provides. When
an alert comes in, you want to be able to get to your logs right away to see what’s going on. This is what the dashboard does. It is simple to follow and it enables you to hunt for threats and navigate around IP addresses involved in an incident; where applicable, the incident also includes the remediation steps for your security analysts.
This is an excerpt from 7 Experts on Implementing Microsoft 365 Defender. This eBook was generously sponsored by BlueVoyant.
