Most IT pros see security as a cost center. But security done right provides a positive ROI and reduces the total cost of ownership for your Microsoft Office 365 environment, now called Microsoft 365.

“CoreView is just an easy interface to Microsoft 365. It allows us to manage properly the Microsoft Office 365 tenant without any security issues. The SLA is very high and we have never experienced downtime. They continue to improve the product day by day,” wrote one G2 Reviewer.

Let’s get started with four quick ways CoreView secures and maximizes M365 economics while mitigating risk:

1. Monitor Tenant and Institute Foolproof Configuration

With native tools, it is hard to configure user and environmental settings to tackle data breaches – before they occur. CoreView instantly identifies and fixes common misconfigurations that account for the vast majority of breaches. This saves admin time and avoids the dramatic cost of data breaches.

2. Deep M365 Forensics Bring Breaches to Their Knees

It is impossible to determine what led to a breach and identifying affected files and systems if activity logs are not retained. CoreView monitors M365 and other SaaS all at once, closely scanning all user and admin activities. IT can view long-term M365 audit log data for deep forensics. Doing forensics manually is time-consuming – if even possible. Perform forensics quickly, economically, and stops another expensive breach from happening.

3. Gain Insight into Dangerous User Behavior

Get alerts and reports of suspicious logins, breach attempts, email forwards, external file sharing, MFA settings and activities, mailbox security risks, weak passwords, policy violations, and more. Imagine how much IT time IT staff, or high-paid consultants, would take to gather these findings.

4. Suspicious Sign-Ins Found – And Stopped in Their Tracks

Find and stop suspicious sign-ins and sign-ins from infected devices. Stop hackers, phishing, and malware spread. As we mentioned, breaches are expensive – so is trying to find incursions without a deep and high-level security view.

One Customer’s Security and Compliance Story 

CoreView starts the M365 security journey by gaining full visibility into the tenant’s security posture, which is done with a Microsoft Office 365 Health Check. Imagine the cost to have a consultant gather all this information. Incalculable!

Such a check was run on a large government agency and identified several areas of new and near-immediate payback. The Health Check found:

• 168 users with access to >5 mailboxes
• 18,649 users don’t require MFA enabled
• 137 users with admin roles
• 28 users with global admin credentials
• 91,910 failed sign in the last 30 days
• 7,750 cloud-only users do not currently require a strong password
• 583 users do not have litigation holds active

Efficient Alerts and Auditing for Microsoft 365 for Breach Mitigation

According to Ponemon’s ‘Cost of a Data Breach’ Survey, the cost of losing a single file is $141. When did you ever lose a single file? And those files add up. The average cost to an enterprise of a breach is a staggering $3.62 million. 

It is about 191 days on average to figure out that you have had a data breach. 

Meanwhile, over 70% of M365 business users suffer at least one compromised account each month. 

Reducing mistakes helps eliminate breaches. “Through 2020, 80% of cloud breaches will be due to customer misconfiguration, mismanaged credentials or insider theft, not cloud provider vulnerabilities,” said Neil Macdonald, Analyst – Gartner.

One enterprise we talked to said that they have improved their response time to block remote hacker attempts by over 500%. One customer based in the mid-western US said that they used to spend approximately 80 hours/month running their own PowerShell scripts and sifting through the piles of data to search for anomalous sign-ins across their different geographic locations. Now they spend about 10 hours/month monitoring for suspicious sign-ins and can take immediate action when they find an issue.

Real-time Monitoring and Alerts for Security Compliance Issues  

Another CoreView user spent 10 to 50 hours every month writing and running custom PowerShell scripts to decipher the millions of log entries and search for security problems. Now they leverage CoreView to provide automated alerts for security issues on an almost real-time basis. 

An enterprise organization based in the northeastern US, reported that CoreView had saved their IT team over 1,000 hours last year when researching and analyzing security-related incidents. 

On average, CoreView saves 67 hours per month during audits by accessing human-readable log data.

The CoreView Security Payoff

CoreView offers an array of security features packed with economic payoffs, including:

• Real-time activity monitoring and alerts: Monitor your entire Microsoft 365 environment to ensure it’s secure
• Be notified immediately when security issues arise to mitigate risk (breaches, malware, infected devices, external attacks, etc.)
• Save hours of time by understanding and resolving issues the same day, versus weeks later
• Improve security audits and forensic investigations: Microsoft stores activity logs for 90 days, CoreView stores them for 7+ years
• On average, saves 67 hours per month during audits by accessing human-readable log data

Compliance Monitoring features include: 

• 200+ customizable reports to cover all aspects of Microsoft 365 usage and activity, so you’re better equipped to see if employees are following company policies and keeping files secure
• On average, this saves a single security admin 320 hours per month with live compliance reports based on the user activity within the tenet

Firm ROI from Stopping Security Breaches Across Your Whole SaaS Ecosystem

The CoreView solution is all about Microsoft Office 365. Meanwhile, our CoreSuite solution addresses the entire SaaS stack, and helps prevent security breaches across your cloud applications library by:

• Showing applications with overly-aggressive permissions to access corporate data, and enabling 1-click blacklisting
• Measuring vendor compliance with security and privacy regulations like GDPR, Privacy Shield, ISO, SOC, etc.
• Identifying data leakage from emails and shared files
• Alerting you to security breaches in the applications your employees use, incl. identifying the affected users, and the remediation steps
• Showing users who might have left the company but still have accounts that should be deleted

Soft ROI from Saving Time and Effort

CoreSuite saves time by making it much easier to do things that used to take a lot of effort, such as:

• Discovering applications automatically
• Understanding how employees are using applications
• Keeping track of renewals via alerts and a centralized calendar
• Centralizing all the documents and correspondence (contracts, invoices, DPAs, notifications, etc.)
• Cataloging the compliance status of all your vendors, allowing you to instantly browse or filter for it, and report on it to other departments

Driving ROI for Your Entire SaaS Ecosystem

While most of CoreView’s solutions drive Microsoft Office 365 ROI, CoreSuite achieves the same benefits across your full SaaS landscape. But how? By automating many time-consuming tasks and enabling you to do things that simply were not possible before. Armed with that knowledge and automation, you can cut costs, improve security and vendor compliance, and get a comprehensive understanding of your environment. Those benefits result in CoreSuite delivering a strong, positive ROI.