In recent years, there have been numerous high-profile incidents targeting on-premises exchanges, causing major disruption and costing huge sums to resolve. Hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities on an unprecedented scale, as evidenced by the notorious HAFNIUM breach and following supply chain ransomware attacks.
Being prudent with protection patching is essential for on-premises management, but the sad reality is many organizations fail to react when updates are released. Despite Microsoft issuing cumulative patches in the wake of HAFNIUM, a representative scan of 100,000 servers found 30% remained unpatched five months later – a shocking figure that highlights how easily bad actors can prey on incompetence.

While cloud security presents its challenges with cybercriminals constantly trying to break in, one of the primary benefits of Migrating from Exchange to Office 365 is patches are automatically deployed, ensuring your network is primed against threat vectors as they emerge – sparing the blushes of careless admins who may otherwise get caught out.

The nature of the beast means safety will always be a concern, but the Microsoft cloud offers relative safety in the form of:

Threat protection: The Defender portal comprises anti-phishing features that identify emails containing malware, instantly blocking delivery to greatly reduce the risk of zero-day exploits. The ‘prevention, detection, and remediation’ model can increase your security posture.

Privacy controls: Various options enable you to protect privacy, such as blocking access from open Wi-Fi networks and setting expiration dates for links shared externally. Additionally, data is encrypted in both rest and transit, and you can remotely tap content from lost or stolen devices.

Automatic MFA: The security default settings enable you to easily enforce MFA – a process requiring users to confirm sign-in attempts via additional verification methods, such as receiving pin codes on phones. This significantly hardens your defense against brute-force attacks on usernames and passwords, while progressive conditional access policies can also be set.

Information governance: To control data loss, sensitivity labels can be applied to specific users, groups, or content. Access is controlled and actions such as email forwarding, printing, and copy and pasting can be blocked to maintain compliance and preserve confidential data. With global data centers, multi-geo data residency is even available.