1. No more capital expenditures: Why pay for expensive hardware when you don’t have to? As a subscription service, Azure frees you from upfront capital expenses and the time it takes to manage services locally. And that means you can focus on what’s important: running your business.
2. Business continuity, no matter what: We all know that a data disaster is a business disaster. Even a minor outage can put you at a competitive disadvantage. With Azure, ensure your apps work when you need them the most—without the expense of secondary infrastructure. Don’t be the company without a plan.
3. Paying only for what you use: Sometimes you need more capacity, sometimes you need less. Azure can easily stretch to meet seasonal needs according to business growth and demands.
4. A tiered approach to the cloud: Moving to the cloud shouldn’t be an all-or-nothing decision. And it certainly shouldn’t be a hassle. With Azure, you can move any or all your business applications on your timeline and when you’re ready. From accounting and HR to commerce and CRM, there’s a place for everything in Azure
5. Security, security, and more security: Safeguard your business with unmatched security management and threat protection for all applications and data, whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud. Plus, Azure has more security and certifications than any other cloud provider. Complement platform’s native security features with our managed Azure Security services.

Microsoft has provided a plethora of free tools that can help with the assessment of your cybersecurity posture.

One of those security tools is “Microsoft Security Assessment for your business”.

As part of that questionnaire, Microsoft security experts have collaborated to create a personalized Cybersecurity Assessment covering more than 20 security points in 4 key Cybersecurity categories with the purpose of helping you pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in your Cybersecurity efforts.

The four Cybersecurity categories are contained under the following headings:

1. How secure are your users and accounts?
2. How protected are you from threats?
3. How safe is your data?
4. How effectively are you managing security?

This relatively quick security assessment most likely will identify the need to enforce certain security policies for your company and most likely will raise more questions in regards to your security posture.

By using security industry standards, like Azure CIS, ISO 27001 or PCI standards, you can rest assured that your data and applications hosted in Azure are very well protected. Our managed Azure Security services make this onerous task very simple!

Cloud adoption continues, and it’s easy to see why. According to a recent Microsoft study (Bredin SMB research for Microsoft, March 2019), there are three key reasons small and midsize businesses consider cloud services: 

• Cost savings​ 
• Improved security​ 
• Easy access to documents and applications from multiple locations 

Why wait?
Take charge of your Azure security and let the professionals secure your environment using the latest industry security standards like CIS, PCI or ISO.

Our managed Azure Security Services are a perfect fit for any small and medium businesses that have workloads in the Cloud: starting with an in-depth assessment of the existing security controls and continuing with automated remediation of the essential controls that are deemed business critical by you!

Microsoft is now a serious security vendor. The center piece of their investment in intelligence is the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. This is how they describe the way that Microsoft synthesize a vast amount of data from a huge variety of sources: 400 billion emails get analyzed by Outlook.com and Office 365 email services every month. 

1.2 billion devices are updated monthly. The 1.2B includes ~750M Windows 10 monthly active devices which they receive telemetry, the balance is Win8/7/Vista/XP which communicate with Windows Update on a monthly basis. 400 Billion emails analyzed monthly.

Microsoft operates 200-plus global cloud, consumer, and commercial services. Everything from outlook.com to Xbox Live to Office 365 to Azure, and so on. And with all of those services, they have a tremendous amount of surface area that they defend.

And so, Microsoft sees more attacks than most other companies on any given day. They get a lot of information from defending against those attacks.

1 Billion plus Azure user accounts give them tremendous insight into how people authenticate to Azure. And that, combined with the 450 billion monthly authentications that they do with Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Account, really give them some tremendous insight into what is normal behavior when it comes to sign-ins and authentications, and what is abnormal behavior, and how often is it that someone has the right password, but they’re not the person they say they are.

Bing scans about 18 billion web pages every month, giving them really great insight into what people are doing with web scripting technologies when it comes to attacks and phishing campaigns. And they have a great way to look at that and understand how they should help customers defend based on that information.

On top of all of that Microsoft layer shared threat data that they get from their partners, from the researchers at Microsoft who are part of their 3,500-plus people that are full time on security, and law enforcement agencies that they partner with worldwide through their digital crimes unit, as well as botnet data that they collect through the digital crimes unit. All of that intelligence makes up the Intelligent Security Graph.

Most of the headlines talking about cyber attacks are about big, well-known businesses. You probably understand that there is a chance that smaller businesses could be targeted, but you may not have the time or expertise to really evaluate the risk. The annual Verizon Data Breach report in 2018 found that 58 percent of all breaches in the past year occurred at small businesses – exceeding those at large corporations.

The threat is real and discounting the threat can lead to inadequate security protections. Hackers continuously monitor the entire market for areas of vulnerabilities and often target smaller companies precisely because they know those businesses have under-invested in cybersecurity.

Years ago, having an internet firewall, PC antivirus, and email filtering were sufficient to protect your business. 

But many things have changed since those simpler days:

• Data is in the cloud, rather than all being inside your location. That’s good news for users, who have easier options for getting things done wherever they go. But it also means you have more points of risk to think about: they’re using more mobile devices – that they can lose; they’re working from home, from coffee shops, airports, airplanes.

•Phishing attacks that are getting harder and harder to recognize

•Ransomware that twists the power of encryption to work against you; taking critical files hostage

•Social engineering attacks that take advantage of people being busy

Cybercriminals have upped their game.  You need to up your game too.  But you don’t have time to become a cybersecurity expert.  You don’t have time to STAY a cybersecurity expert because of how threats change month to month: use our Managed Azure Security services to secure your Azure environment using industry best standards!