Does it ever feel like the programs and applications put in place to increase productivity, reduce risk, and control costs evolve and change faster than adoption strategies can occur within your company? In fact, it may even be that productivity decreases, causing costs and risks to increase; the exact opposite of what you are trying to accomplish. One way to avoid this situation is to apply forward-looking cloud security strategies around adoption and implementation at your organization.
Here is a scenario that may sound familiar. Like many organizations, you are in the process of migrating to a cloud-based service, such as Office 365 Exchange Online (Microsoft’s cloud-hosted email platform). Your organization may have security requirements for Exchange Online that include cloud security measures like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and data loss prevention (DLP). With a migration of this importance, chances are good you have a costly capital project in place to gather requirements, implement changes for the cloud security platform, and enable MFA and DLP, among other security needs.
Fast forward 6-8 months, and you now are notified that your application provider for time and billing (or supply chain, etc.) ERP is moving to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Once again, you will need another costly capital project (likely not in the budget). What's more, users will now be required to remember two different passwords on two separate MFA platforms, creating a poor experience and productivity challenges.
With solutions and cloud computing requirements evolving so rapidly, it is essential to strategically plan around the adoption and implementation of cloud security solutions, rather than a single, point-in-time approach.
Consider the above situation, but this time the solutions were thoughtfully planned out as part of a continuous cloud security improvement approach, which was mindful of potential end-user impacts.
This type of approach would involve using Active Directory (Azure AD), a cloud-based service for managing identities and access, to provide the backbone for these solutions. With Azure AD’s Premium features, end-users do not need to remember application-specific passwords, but rather utilize a single sign-on (SSO) experience for all on-premises and cloud applications, saving time and frustration. A well-planned strategy can also help you avoid unexpected capital expenses, allowing for more predictable and controlled budgeting.
If you have questions about adopting a continuous cloud security improvement model for your business, please reach out to your Account Manager, or connect with us at info@systemsengineering.com or call 888.624.6737.
Kent Goodrow, Account Executive at Systems Engineering. He has over a decade of IT experience spanning roles as a system administrator, engineer, manager, and account executive. As account executive, Kent is responsible for maintaining customer relationships, multi-year budgets, and IT improvement models (aligning technology with business goals and plans).