Moving through life with blinders on is never a good idea, especially if things aren’t going well. The more you ignore existing problems, the longer they’ll persist. And that can potentially hurt your business. Your business’s security settings are the same way. We’ve discussed their value before—how important it is to implement security policies that make sense for your business and keep your data safe from any outside threats.
What we haven’t discussed yet is equally important: after you turn on these security settings, you need to be able to take off your blinders and know exactly what’s going on in your environment. Who’s accessing certain things? Should they be? Are you facing any outside threats? And are the security settings you put in place really working for your organization?
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That last question in particular is key. If you want to protect your data, you really have to ensure that you’re constantly reevaluating and adapting your security settings to your ever-changing needs as an organization.
That’s why Office Protect was created—to help you always stay on top of your security. Let’s take off those blinders and review how it can make a world of difference for your business.
Security monitoring with Office Protect
First, let’s discuss some of the things Office Protect will continuously monitor and keep you informed about:
- Administrator access: Office Protect will monitor individuals with administrator access and determine whether any of them are violating your security policy.
- Mailbox activities: You’ll get an alert whenever there are missing or deleted emails, inbox rules that weren’t created by a user or administrator, or unusual signatures.
- Sign-ins: Office Protect will flag any sign-ins from unknown locations or devices.
- Security policies: You’ll be notified if any changes are made to your security policies.
- External threats: Hackers can easily delete accounts, impersonate management, create new accounts for themselves, or change your security settings through fairly simple techniques such as phishing or social engineering. Office Protect steps in to let you know if any of these things are happening.
- Internal threats: Often, the most serious threats come from inside your organization, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In fact, almost half of all IT incidents result from human error. With Office Protect, you’ll know if users are sharing private data publicly, if anyone is sending a large number of emails to an external source, or if an unknown person is accessing an employee account.
Security reporting with valuable insight
Not only does Office Protect send you regular updates about important things going on in your environment, but it also lets you access reports of your overall security health.
Activity dashboards
Office Protect’s activity dashboards allow you to see everything going on in your business. They’ll alert you of any suspicious activities, but you can also search for individual employees and see if they are behaving in a way that might harm your environment. This allows you to not only get an overall picture of your security but also to dig deeper into specific activities, if needed.
Automated reports
Office Protect will also generate automated reports to help you see an overall snapshot of your security profile. These reports help you understand your security environment and make any necessary high-level changes.
You can export these reports to a PDF or CSV file for further analysis or presentation, and white-label reports will also be provided so you can put your own company logo on them.
Office Protect eliminates all of the unnecessary complications of security reporting by focusing only on the 20 or fewer things that you really need to know. It’s designed with small business owners like you in mind who do not have tons of time to dig through reports.
With your dashboards and automated reports, everything is easy to read—it will take only a few minutes to discern exactly what is going on with your security so you can make adjustments accordingly.
Your dashboard and any of your automated reports can be accessed via the Office Protect menu, under ‘Dashboards’ and ‘Reports’, respectively. For your convenience, the dashboard can be filtered by specific dates, names, and activities.
Business benefits of security reporting
Making key decisions
The main purpose of a dashboard is to give you key information in a short period of time so you can make impactful business decisions. Seeing too much information is just as useless as not seeing enough. Office Protect’s dashboard concentrates on giving you just the right amount of data so you can make well-informed decisions about security.
Proactive monitoring
Looking at reports regularly will allow you to stop cyber security threats before they even present themselves. Is one user constantly acting suspiciously, logging in from unknown devices and locations? You can look into that and create useful policies before a hacker has a chance to use that public coffee shop internet connection to exploit your data. The number of possible threats you face is endless, but so are the things you can do to prevent attacks on your environment.
Accountability
Too often, business owners eagerly set up security policies but become overwhelmed with all of the realities of their daily work and never revisit active issues. This leaves them open to attacks as hackers evolve while they remain stagnant. Easy-to-read dashboards and automatically generated reports provide constant reminders of everything you need to know to keep your security from falling by the wayside.
Protect what matters most
Putting the right settings in place is just the first step to enjoying greater security. Proactively monitoring your environment and staying on top of all information can make the difference between failure and success—and hopefully, you only ever experience the latter.
Contact us for more information about how Office Protect can help secure your business, or become a partner to get started ASAP.
