Five Security Takeaways From Last Week
Cybersecurity continues to be a key challenge for organizations and they need to allocate both time and other resources to defending, fighting and recovering from cyberattacks. At Microsoft we focus on three areas to help our customers stay secure: running security operations that work for them, building enterprise-class technology, and driving partnerships for a heterogeneous world. Last week was a busy news week with two of the company’s flagship events taking place in Florida - Microsoft Ignite for developers and IT professionals, and Microsoft Envision for business influencers and thought leaders. And we made several great security announcements during the week, in product and service innovation and policy and partnership developments:
1. Ending passwords: Last week, we declared an end to passwords, delivering new support for password-less sign-in to Azure AD-connected apps via Microsoft Authenticator. Using a multi-factor sign-in method, enterprises can reduce compromise by 99.9 and it make life easier for your users too.
2. Microsoft Secure Score: We also announced Microsoft Secure Score, expanding from Office 365 to include EMS and Azure Security Center. Microsoft Secure Score lets you analyze your organization’s security based on your regular activities and settings. It provides an assessment score and recommendations to help organizations reduce up to thirtyfold the chance of a breach.
3. Microsoft Threat Protection. To help protect, detect and remediate cyberthreats, Microsoft Threat Protection is a comprehensive end-to-end solution that brings together advanced threat protection and auto-remediation across email, PCs, identities and infrastructure in the Microsoft 365 console. This will be a great time saver for analysts, letting them automate basic but critical security tasks.
4. Expanding the Cybersecurity Tech Accord. Building on years of cyber policy work and engagement with industry, we saw an opportunity for companies to work as a united front in defense of customers and in the spirit of protecting society from evolving and emerging threats online. We worked with 33 other companies to turn this into a reality with the establishment of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord back in April. Last week we were pleased to announce that we’ve seen rapid expansion in the last six months growing from 34 to 61 companies, including companies from around the globe and from all aspects of the tech industry.
5. Digital Peace Now campaign. On Saturday, as a further extension of our cyber policy work, we launched Digital Peace Now – a new, multi-year public campaign that aims to bring together the voices of digital citizens around the world to encourage world leaders to achieve digital peace. As part of this campaign, we launched the Digital Peace Now Petition and we’re urging everyone who cares about safety and security online to take action and sign the petition now.