3 Must-Have Protections for Office 365 and G Suite

When it comes to your taking your organization to the cloud, the two viable options include Office 365 and G Suite. Therefore, the G Suite vs Office 365 debate will always exist in organizations’ minds when deciding between the two.

Both G Suite and Office 365 offer numerous benefits to organizations. Not only can these suites enhance your organization’s collaboration efforts, but they are capable of improving employee productivity and efficiency.

Moreover, these suites come with all kinds of apps and services. From unlimited cloud storage to anti-malware threats detection, signing up your organization for Office 365 or G Suite is a must in the modern day. But there is one thing we have to talk about — security.

Microsoft and Google take malware threats very seriously. But there’s a debate to be held regarding how much both providers offer in terms of security. We must remember that data protection isn’t their primary job. Therefore, organizations must learn to handle data themselves.

Luckily, we’ve had experience with both suites and are bringing you a guide explaining the three must-have protections. So with all that said, let’s start.

3 Must-Have Protections to Safeguard your Organization

Data is becoming more valuable by the day. This is evident by the fact that hackers are actively trying to compromise organizations and steal their data. Therefore, it becomes a priority to protect workloads and infrastructures. Luckily, both Office 365 and G Suite have layered security infrastructures designed to protect user accounts.

But many experts are saying it’s not enough. So what can organizations do to protect themselves against the growing rate of cloud security threats? Let’s find out.

Advanced Threat Protection

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is the ultimate total protection tool for organizations on the cloud. The great thing about ATP solutions is that you can fully integrate them into your Office 365 and G Suite.

That makes going with third-party ATP solutions a no-brainer decision. But what are these tools capable of? ATP is a modern security solution equipped with all kinds of security features. From anti-malware protection to data encryption, and privileged identity management, these solutions take care of everything.

ATP is the type of protection that will eliminate risks and protect business users from the growing rate of cyberattacks. There are many third-party ATP providers on the market. Some include the following:

• Palo Alto Networks WildFire
• Hornetsecurity
• Kaspersky ATP
• IRONSCALES
• Check Point SandBlast

In addition, both Office 365 and G Suite offer native tools for advanced threat protection. For Office 365, the tool is Microsoft Defender, while the tool for G Suite is Advanced Protection Program. These tools, although capable, do have limitations. So it’s best to consult with third-party tools on what they can do for your organizations and protect against malicious actors.

Email Protection

Email is the most important service for any organization using the cloud. After all, we all communicate internally and externally using email. That makes your email accounts valid targets. Hackers will actively try to compromise your business operations by hacking into your email account.

So email protection becomes essential. Luckily, both Office 365 and G Suite offer all kinds of email protection features. From full data encryption to multi-factor authentication, user permissions, and email backups, these features are designed to prevent threat actors from getting into your email account.

Although advised, you don’t necessarily need to use third-party tools to protect your email. In our experience, the best protection for your email is to train employees on safely accessing and using email.

Backups

Finally, let’s talk about backups. Backups are essential for business continuity. When handling large amounts of data from these cloud services and the numerous desktop apps, it becomes clear that one way to protect your data is to keep copies.

Backups are exactly that. They’re copies of your most important data. You can back up all kinds of data from your G Suite and Office 365, including email data and data from any online service.

Unfortunately, both suites aren’t the best equipped when it comes to data backups. Although there are ways to backup data from Gmail and Outlook, we need to also backup data from other apps such as Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts.

In that case, it’s best to use third-party backup tools. These tools can back up your entire suite and keep the backups on their data centers. That way, you’re adding another layer of defense by not compromising local backups.

In addition, backups are important for compliance with the many data protection regulations. Whenever you need to show that you’re GDPR compliant, you can rest assured by knowing these tools provide GDPR User Access and tons of additional compliance security features.

Conclusion

That concludes the three must-have protection for Office 365 and G Suite. We hope we’ve accurately explained the areas where both suites are lacking and how you can ensure total data protection.

All that’s left is to research and find the tools that will provide the best protection against internal and external threats.