Francois Joubert, enterprise account manager for South Africa at Rubrik, says, “We’ve seen an accelerated shift to the cloud since the pandemic broke out, accompanied by growing adoption of tools such as M365. It’s interesting that 75% of organisations say that M365 is a Tier 1 application and 62% of them use the full suite, but 41% aren’t using tools to protect their M365 environment from cyber attacks. On top of that, 32% don’t have a ransomware remediation plan or they aren’t confident that the plan they do have, will work.”
The majority (62%) of the survey’s respondents said they leveraged the full M365 collaboration suite including Microsoft Teams, while 14% said they had the full M365 suite and Dynamics, 12% said they used M365 for email only and 10% said they used it for email, document and content management with Sharepoint and OneDrive.
Three quarters of the respondents (75%) to this survey consider M365 to be a Tier 1 application within their organisation. 15% say that M365 is important to their business but not critical, and 10% say that while it’s not critical at the moment, but as they further invest in M365 it will be in the future.
When it comes to their ransomware strategy for M365, 59% of respondents say they have an additional existing third party backup provider for M365. Almost a third of respondents (31%) say they use only native tools from Microsoft such as retention policy, litigation hold and e-discovery. 10% of respondents say they have no protection.
Asked what they would do in the event that ransomware attacked their M365 data, 68% of respondents say they have a structured ransomware recovery process and the right tools to recover. 20% of respondents don’t have a ransomware recovery process and 12% say they aren’t sure and would like to review their risk posture.
…the maturity in terms of understanding the cyber risks is still lagging behind the adoption of M365.
When asked if they were familiar with Microsoft’s recommendations for ransomware protection for M365, 69% of respondents said they are aware Microsoft recommends in its Microsoft 365 service agreement “that you regularly back up your content and data that you store on the services or store using third-party apps and services."
When it comes to applying zero trust principles in their M365 environment, half of respondents (50%) say they only have multi factor authentication; a quarter (25%) have fully implemented zero trust architecture and a physical air gap; 13% say they haven’t implemented zero trust principles or architecture in their M365 environment; and 12% say they aren’t sure and would like to review their risk posture.
Joubert says, “Based on the survey outcomes, we can see that the maturity in terms of understanding the cyber risks is still lagging behind the adoption of M365.
“We’re seeing an increased number of white papers on cyber-attacks targeting M365 environments and these environments need to be safeguarded. Yet the survey results show that there is still a large proportion of organisations adopting M365 with no or limited strategies to safeguard against cyber and ransomware attacks.
“This shows a lack of understanding of the risks associated with M365 adoption and organisations need to explore tools to deploy zero trust principles, Immutability, air-gapped environments, encryption and protection mechanisms to prevent data loss if for example an admin account gets compromised. Cyber-attacks are increasing and the bad actors are targeting these cloud environments, which shows the importance of protecting data through data security whether data lives in a datacentre or in the cloud.”
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