10 Critical Responsibilities of the Cybersecurity Manager
More organizations than ever are now relying on Microsoft Office 365 as a service to access widely used personal productivity applications. But not many of those organizations have a lot of visibility into how susceptible those files might be to potential security threats.
To address that specific issue, Barracuda Networks this week made available a free Barracuda Email Threat Scan for Office 365 cloud service that can be employed to determine what types of attacks a particular file might be vulnerable to at a time when IT security attacks are becoming more sophisticated and varied than ever.
Asaf Cidon, vice president of content security services for Barracuda Networks, says the Barracuda Email Threat Scan for Office 365, announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference, will be made available for free to customers for a limited time.
“A lot of organizations are not exactly sure what their security posture is on a Microsoft cloud,” says Cidon. “We want to make it possible for them to visualize that.”
To better illustrate that point, Barracuda Networks analyzed 20,000 Office 365 mailboxes and found that 93 percent of accounts had been infected with at least one Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). On average, Barracuda Networks says 125 threats per account were discovered.
Cidon says Barracuda Networks has similar ambitions in place for delivering security scans and protecting content residing within multiple cloud services. In the meantime, IT organizations should take note of the fact that Microsoft Office 365 files in the cloud appear to be no less or more secure than they were when they deployed on premise. How that might ultimately affect anyone’s decision to embrace cloud services such as Microsoft Office 365 will vary widely. But it is clear there’s going to be a critical need for additional methods to secure the data residing in all those cloud services.
