Securing O365 for Mobile Employees with MTD
O365 Enables Mobile Productivity
Microsoft Office 365 (O365) is used by over a million companies worldwide and controls about 48% of the market share for major office suite technologies worldwide, according to Statista. Enabling cross-platform productivity and communication across traditional and mobile endpoints allowed companies to shift to distributed and remote workforces with minimal disruption to daily activity. With this shift has come further adoption of bring your own device (BYOD) for improved productivity, workflow, data access, and communication needs.
“Simply put, do not roll out O365 on mobile without MTD. It is that simple. Think about all of the corporate data sitting in Outlook or being discussed in Teams on mobile endpoints. Would you enable that amount of exposure on any other platform without protection? Never.”
– Eric Green, Cyber Defense Operations at TikTok
Mobile Data Access Expands the Attack Surface
The rise of BYOD and distributed workforces has also exposed enterprises to potential attacks from increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats as many of these new security layers still focus almost exclusively on traditional endpoints. Adversaries need only find one unprotected device to wreak havoc on an enterprise’s infrastructure. According to Verizon’s Mobile Security Index,
- 79% of respondents said the shift to remote or hybrid work has undermined the cybersecurity of their organizations due to the distribution of devices and less secure networks.
- 87% surveyed said they have been forced to re-evaluate how they operate as attacks on mobile devices grow.
- 46% of the companies surveyed said they had suffered a compromise involving a mobile device in the past 12 months.
While O365, through Microsoft Endpoint Manager, enables IT and security teams to manage mobile endpoints as the UEM, it lacks the necessary mobile threat defense (MTD) layer critical to an effective advanced security architecture, such as Zero Trust.
Zimperium Delivers Mobile Security for O365
Zimperium paired with Microsoft enhances Zero Trust architectures by delivering comprehensive mobile risk posture data. Together, the solutions advance mobile security, bringing Zero Trust capabilities to mobile endpoints and enabling IT and security administrators to decrease their attack surface and increase their overall security confidence. Zimperium brings unique benefits to Microsoft O365, including:
- On-device detection that does not require cloud analysis or connection.
- Threat remediation and user notification on the device.
- Individual user and group based mobile security and access policies.
- The only MTD solution that can be installed and operated on the Azure cloud.
- Strict privacy functionality with no user information sent to the cloud.
Enabling Mobile Zero Trust with Zimperium and Microsoft
Microsoft Endpoint Manager was not designed to detect active attacks, and organizations still need to implement an MTD solution to complete protection. By implementing Zimperium’s MTD solution, zIPS, into the mobile security stack, IT and security teams can fill the legacy applications’ security gaps while integrating seamlessly into existing workflows.
zIPS can also be implemented with mobile application management without enrollment (MAM-WE), which is particularly helpful to ensuring secure access to Office 365 applications in BYOD situations. In MAM-WE implementation, when a user launches a work application on a device, the application allows access only when MTD is running on the device.
“The Zimperium platform has allowed us to protect O365 and other apps and provide our associates with more freedom, less administrative overhead, and more security than they’ve had before. This really hits all the goals of a user-friendly security program.”
– Principal Security Architect for a Major Medical Device Company
Recommended Reading
Securing O365 & Enterprise Apps on Mobile Devices: Recommendations from Gartner
Speakers: Chris Silva, VP Analyst with Gartner; and Jon Paterson, CTO with Zimperium
How to Implement Mobile BYOD in a Zero Trust Environment
While BYOD provides employees with greater flexibility, it also creates new security risks. Organizations need to include MTD as part of their Zero Trust strategies to improve BYOD security and prevent mobile devices from compromising threats. Learn more.
Top 4 Threats to O365 on Mobile Devices (And How to Stop Them)
Speakers: JT Keating, Zimperium’s SVP of Product Strategy, & Kern Smith, Zimperium’s VP of Solution Engineering