How to Secure your Digital Transformation

When undergoing a Digital Transformation, it’s important for your organization to protect your cloud and backup your data.

You will also want to secure access to information as well cloud applications.

If your business is making the leap to the cloud from a purely on-prem environment, you will be combining information from multiple departments and systems. Therefore, you will need to organize this information in the cloud and create identity and access management (IAM) policies, so employees can only access the information they need to do their jobs.

Remember, when securing your cloud environment, it’s one thing to keep the bad guys out, it’s another to let everyone in your company have access to everything.

If you’re moving to Microsoft 365, you will use Azure Active Directory to configure permission groups and policies that can then be utilized in SharePoint to manage who has access to the right information.

Secure Digital Transformation in Practice

This all sounds great you might be saying, but what does a secure digital transformation actually look like?

Let’s say you have forty people in your organization. You are moving to Microsoft 365 for the first time and want to take advantage of SharePoint for file storage and access.

You can utilize SharePoint as a company intranet and have separate document libraries that can be accessed by the whole company or only certain departments. This is where the permission groups and policies come into play. For example, Sales may have their own library that they can edit and view, but Marketing may only need read-only access to add flyers and sales material. Accounting could have their own library that only they can view and edit, and no one else in the organization can see it in SharePoint.

Organizing your information on a “need to know” basis is a good strategy for securing files internally.

Additionally, if your organization is using third-party applications, you can take advantage of Microsoft 365’s single sign-on feature to create an easier sign-in experience and enable enhanced security controls. This way your users will only need to remember their Microsoft 365 credentials to log into other apps.

To take advantage of single sign-on, you will need to make sure you have Azure Active Directory Premium licenses as well.

Remember: the bigger your organization is, and the more departments you have, the more work will need to be done to organize and secure access to files and applications. It’s important to do this correctly from the beginning to standardize and simplify operations and procedures down the line.

To DIY or Not?

If your organization has an IT department or IT professional who feels comfortable navigating the Windows Admin Center and configuring Azure Active Directory and SharePoint, then you can probably secure your digital transformation on your own.

If you don’t though, we would recommend working with a Microsoft Partner who has the experience and know-how to configure everything correctly from the get-go and will continue to work with you and advise you as your organization grows.