Migrating to Office 365 can seem like an immense task, but making the switch itself is just the tip of the iceberg. The real challenge with Office 365 is keeping tabs on everything. You might be wondering why you would need to, and the answer is quite simple: effectively managing your Office 365 environment not only helps keep it secure, but also helps you get the most out of your deployment.
So how do you go about doing this?
The mantra is record and audit. With proper records and by performing regular audits, you’ll effectively secure your Office 365 environment.
How do you know what to record?
A good place to start is with your Office 365 users; you should determine who your users are, what groups have been configured, and how your mailboxes have been configured so you can better plan for resources.
For example, a major issue in larger organizations with a high number of employees is not knowing when users have left the organization. Running a weekly or monthly report to see a user’s last logon time can help you quickly and easily identify inactive users. Once you have this information, you can contact the managers of these inactive users to confirm whether or not they’ve left the organization, and take appropriate action on their mailbox and content if so.
On a similar note, your organization purchases Office 365 licenses on a subscription basis; if these licenses are not properly utilized, you’ll be spending more on licenses than you need to. You can avoid this by factoring in employees joining, leaving, and changing departments within the organization and accordingly assign, remove, purchase, or recycle licenses.
Auditing is a ritual
Auditing isn’t just for meeting compliance mandates. Regular auditing helps you ensure that your Office 365 environment is secure.
Ransomware has been plaguing organizations for years, disrupting business globally and costing untold sums. If you could identify mail activity anomalies before they disrupt users, there’s a good chance you could save your organization from potential cyberattacks. Mailbox traffic audit reports can help you analyze your organization’s Office 365 mailbox traffic with information such as the volume of spam entering your organization’s mailboxes as well as the users who’ve received the most malware-infected spam.
However, Office 365 isn’t the best when it comes to these aspects, as it not only falls short on features you really need, but doesn’t offer the easiest reporting and auditing experience either. With so many security issues and compliance mandates springing up, you need a straightforward way to report on and audit your Office 365 environment. That’s where Log360 can help. Log360’s Office 365 reporting, auditing, and alerting capabilities give you a bird’s-eye view of Exchange Online and Azure Active Directory. Download a free, 30-day trial of Log360 and see how easy securing your Office 365 environment can be.
