“I have customers moving to Office 365, so they don’t need additional security.”

As the support supervisor for a premier SaaS security distributor, I often hear similar quotes from customers. They are migrating over to, or are already on, Microsoft Office 365, and believe it is sufficient for their spam, encryption and archiving needs. This may be the case for some, but my experience of having many customers return shortly after migration illustrates that many businesses are still finding the need to supplement the native capabilities of Office 365 to establish a strong security posture and maintain compliance in their industry.

Office 365 is not necessarily an end-all, be-all solution for companies’ security requirements. Additional layers of protection are recommended to provide feature-rich tools for today’s rapidly changing security landscape.

Syneteks has a strong and lasting relationship with McAfee, including the SaaS Email Protection, Encryption and Archiving solutions. Here are five reasons why having these in conjunction with Office 365 provides a major security benefit to any organization:

1. Global Threat Intelligence: Office 365 uses several scanning engines, but the actual protection against spam, viruses and malware has limited scope. For every customer that drops McAfee SaaS for just Office 365, we have another come back after being deluged with spam and threat concerns. Most often, complaints stem from not having the centralized management controls that MSPs require.
2. Active Link Protection: Gone are the days when signature-based anti-virus is enough. Threats evolve by the minute. With the rise of CryptoLocker and cloud-based storage spoofing, links within emails are now the top threat to users. McAfee Click Protect employs a dual-stage scanning approach to embedded links. Like Office 365, the engines perform reputation analysis prior to delivery. The secret sauce is in the protection engaged when a recipient actually clicks the link. McAfee actively scans for malware delivery in real time, virtually eliminating the time gap between the malicious sender and user interaction. This simply cannot be duplicated in Office 365. How strong is link-scanning protection if the link changed to malware after delivery?
3. Graymail Control: In Office 365, graymail is treated the same as spam. This means graymail and actual spam get mixed together without differentiation, leading to frustrated admins and end users attempting to wrangle their quarantines. One returning customer asked if its whitelist needed to be imported. It was graymail the customer wanted, and was delighted when the answer was no: Our solution would handle it properly with simple configuration.
4. Encryption and DLP: Inbound and outbound filtering featuring strong policy-based content scanning is built into our standard package—no upcharge or additional SKUs. Interested in DLP and encryption for compliancy or security concerns? Registered document scanning, pre-built compliance rule sets, RegEx capabilities, custom content filters … all with simple implementation and control. McAfee SaaS Email Encryption offers powerful, easily managed encryption and DLP in one package. Without disrupting end user workflows, confidential data can be encrypted and contained with McAfee SaaS.
5. Email Archiving: Retention, ease of searching and data location. These are three major areas where Office 365 and McAfee SaaS Message Archiving differ. Microsoft stores customer data in different countries, depending on the customer’s location, and Microsoft can relocate this data at any time without notification. This can be a nightmare for any company with geographic or jurisdictional requirements. Only certain Office 365 plans offer full, easy search capabilities. If Office 365 is experiencing an outage, so is your archived mail. If any of these issues made you pause, then McAfee is the answer. McAfee can also be run in redundancy with Microsoft—replicating your data with both services while keeping Microsoft’s archive in the loop.

Don’t get caught in a security trap by solely depending on Office 365 as your security provider. Thoroughly protect your data by utilizing third-party offerings in conjunction with Microsoft.

– Daniel Norris is Support supervisor at Nuvotera’s 24/7 SaaS