Playbook for Protecting Data in Microsoft 365

The march to the cloud continues.  Supporting today’s hybrid workforce requires agility and has placed a greater emphasis on workforce collaboration. That’s why the number of Teams members continues to climb as Microsoft 365 has surpassed an estimated 400 million users worldwide. 

The expanding digital footprint and widespread adoption of Microsoft 365 have made it a prime target for cyberattacks. This is evident from several high profile and infamous data breaches in recent years, including the attack by Lapsus$ group in 2021 and the theft of 60k State Department emails in 2023. 

According to the 2024 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report, Microsoft Office experienced 62 vulnerabilities in 2023. In addition to this, the rise of Generative AI has completely disrupted the way data is accessed and used, underscoring the need for robust security measures to prevent data misuse. 

For organizations leveraging Microsoft 365 as part of their digital transformation initiatives, it is imperative to address the following critical concerns to protect their data and users:

• How to get visibility over the increasing data sprawl across Microsoft 365 suite?
• How to enable secure access to Microsoft 365 from personal devices, connecting from any location?
• How to enforce granular data protection policies to ensure collaboration through Microsoft 365 apps?
• How to defend sensitive data from advanced malware and ransomware attacks?

Why is data in Microsoft 365 at risk?

1 - Data sprawl: SaaS traffic is dominated by data movement. 1 out of every 3 breaches today is the result of shadow data. Data in the cloud is harder to track and protect, making it highly vulnerable to exposure and threats.

2- Unauthorized access: SaaS applications are constantly under the threat of account compromise. With the security perimeter shifting to the cloud, identities have emerged as the new attack surface. Weak credentials and absence of multi-layer security, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), create opportunities for intruders to gain unauthorized access and exfiltrate sensitive data.

3- Excessive sharing permissions: Overly permissive sharing settings, such as creating public links or inviting users to Teams or Slack channels without proper oversight, can expose sensitive data to unauthorized individuals. 

4- Ransomware attacks: Nearly one-third of all data breaches involve ransomware attacks, making it a top threat across 92% of industries. These attacks have become more sophisticated, leveraging the expanded attack surface due to SaaS adoption and SaaS-to-SaaS interconnections, exploiting security vulnerabilities in the cloud and executing targeted phishing campaigns to infiltrate and spread rapidly across the SaaS environments.

5- Access from unmanaged devices: Over 82% of organizations support BYOD at work. These devices often operate beyond the visibility of security teams and without any endpoint security agent, increasing the risk of data breaches and spread of malware through any infected device. 

6- Ineffective access controls: Zero trust principles mandate maintaining an explicit trust model that enables conditional access to corporate resources based on several contextual elements, such as user identity and device security posture. All or nothing access controls, lack the flexibility required by hybrid workers and acts as an inhibitor for the adoption of modern SaaS applications. 

7- Lack of effective monitoring: According to IBM's Cost of Data Breach Report 2024, it takes 199 days to identify a data breach. Lack of visibility into sensitive data access and inadequate audit trails may lead to malicious user activities going unnoticed, resulting in a longer time to detect and resolve breach incidents.

Closing Microsoft 365 security gaps with Forcepoint ONE CASB

Forcepoint, with its multimode cloud access security broker (CASB), provides deep visibility into all the user and data activities within Microsoft 365, along with offering industry-leading data protection and threat protection, while securing the access from any device and location. 

Forcepoint allows organizations to adopt Microsoft 365 with the confidence of knowing that the sensitive data will always remain protected - whether used within Microsoft 365, or shared with other collaboration tools, such as Box and Dropbox.

Here are the six essential Forcepoint capabilities that ensure secure usage of Microsoft 365 within organizations:

1- Centralized visibility and control: Deeper understanding of how data is being shared within and outside the SaaS environments, real-time alerts on suspicious login attempts and data usage, detailed log reporting for forensics and audits, identifying redundant applications.

2- Best-in-class data protection: Preventing data exfiltration through real-time DLP inspection, removal of public sharing of sensitive content, masking content in Microsoft Teams chat, identifying data embedded in images through optical character recognition (OCR). Existing Forcepoint DLP customers can further extend the industry-leading DLP capabilities to SaaS applications and reuse the existing policies to protect data in Microsoft 365.

3- Unified policy enforcement: Integration with Forcepoint DLP to enforce unified data protection policies across all channels — SaaS, web, network, endpoints, and email. 

4- Securing collaboration through personal devices: Agentless reverse-proxy support to secure access to Microsoft 365, patented SAML integration to authenticate user identity, context-driven access control.

5- Advanced threat protection: Real-time and retrospective malware scanning through integration with leading anti-malware engines, REST API support to ingest cloud and access logs to SIEMs. 

6- Streamlining compliance: Over 190+ out-of-the-box DLP patterns to meet compliance requirements for GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and other data protection laws while using Microsoft 365 apps.

To dive deeper into this topic, download this Microsoft 365 Data Security Playbook to learn how Forcepoint addresses the top security use cases while adopting Microsoft 365.