TechTalk Microsoft Security and Compliance, Part Two
Making the jump to Microsoft E5 can help you realize new outcomes in security and productivity.
By Insight Editor / 9 Jun 2021 / Topics: Cybersecurity
By Insight Editor / 9 Jun 2021 / Topics: Cybersecurity
Adopting new solutions can disrupt business as usual, but collaborating with a trusted partner streamlines the experience. In part two of this TechTalk, Anna Donnelly and Joe Flynn explain how Insight Connected Workforce supports our clients’ E5 journeys.
Missed part one? You can check it out here
To experience this week’s episode, listen on the player above, watch the conversation below, or scroll down to read a complete transcript. You can also subscribe to Insight TechTalk on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Audio transcript:
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Anna
Hello again and thank you for joining us for today's Tech Talk. I am Anna Donnelly. I'm a Services Product Manager for Microsoft Services here at Insight. I am joined by Joe Flynn to introduce yourself, Joe.
Joe
Thank you, Anna. Joe Flynn, Services Director within Insights Connected Workforce.
Anna
Thank you. So, this is a little bit of a continuation of our Tech Talk from last week where we discuss the differences and the value of E3 and E5 licensing for Microsoft 365. And today we're going to talk a little bit more about that and then what the actual journey looks like when you are implementing tools and features and solutions in your E5 license. So, last week we talked a little bit about the confusion between E3 and E5 and what the value of E5 is. So, let's just talk a little bit about a refresher. So where are most companies at? What what's the most value that they're getting from their E5 skew If we want to talk a little bit about that before we get into what that journey looks like just to kind of set the stage, Joe.
Joe
Yeah, sure. I mean, if you look at the E5 today, at least a bundled skew of E5, it consists of many great products. Where most value lies for customers and at least where a lot of confusion lies also is where the value is? It's on the security side. The E5 skew has security product. If you look at the office 365 stack, you have Defender for office 365, which consists of DLP, Safe Links, Safe Attachments, you have the E5 skew within windows 10, that consistent Defender in the cloud also, advanced security capabilities at the OS level. And then lastly, you have the enterprise mobility and security suite E5, which has cloud app security Azure information protection, many products that tie up as to an entire ecosystem that all talk together, and you get the benefit of having everything talking together. And when it comes to security policies and other aspects that you want to drive within your organization.
Anna
Great. That's great. Thank you. So then, as we're talking to customers, they get to their E5, they decide they're going to make the investment. What happens next? What does that, we call it a journey? What does that even mean? What does that look like?
Joe
Yeah. So, the one thing we realized when people buy the E5 skew is, a lot of times they're not sure yet how to consume or they try to consume too much at once. And understanding, and you've nailed it, Anna, when you said it's a journey it is a journey. You're never implementing an entirety E5 skew just within a couple of weeks especially if you're a organization of 500, a thousand, as you shift up in the amount of users that journey is going to extend over time because it is user impacting or can be user impacting. So you want to take it slow. You want to understand the impacts and most importantly you don't want to disrupt the business.
Anna
How disruptive when you say disrupt, what do you have? How are we, what are ways it is disrupted? How, how does the, the journey impact that? How do you normally approach it in order to make sure that you're giving everybody the best experience, you're getting your return on investments and you're kind of addressing everything That you just talked about. What does that look like?
Joe
Everyone's journey is going to be different. And many companies I speak to I'll walk you through a sample journey, but again depending on where you are in the cloud today if you're more on premises than in the cloud, like I said the journey is very, usually very specific to the customer and detailed to a specific customer. But most customers, if they're on premises today and just going to the cloud the journey is going to start with productivity. It's going to start with getting your identities in the cloud. Use with the E5 skew make sure you secure those identities. The identities of the front door of the entire organization. If your identities are compromised, they're going to get access to devices. They can get access to locations. They could get access to data that you don't want. So, implement the E5 capabilities of multi-factor authentication, cloud app security to monitor end-user sessions and be able to secure what happens with the user's identity, based on where they are or where they're trying to go to.
Anna
Well, the identity piece, and I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. The identity piece is the foundation of that. That's the thing that you absolutely have to do first to move, to move on in the journey. But otherwise, there are these all things that need to happen consecutively? And I know that there's more in your example there.
Joe
Yeah. Consecutively is a difficult term to use. Identity is the core to everything. Like without an identity or a user account in the cloud, you're not accessing email, you're not accessing OneDrive Teams, all those security capabilities. So, customers have to either create cloud identities or synchronize their identities from on-premises into the cloud. But that always is the baseline to everything from a cloud tool perspective.
Anna
Great. So what happens next then?
Joe
And so, as you shift and you have your identities in the cloud, the productivity suite is first for most customers, email, OneDrive, that seems to be what every customer wants to go to first. Now you're leveraging the cloud, you're getting the features and capabilities of what the cloud has to offer, synchronization of your files into OneDrive, but security has to come into play. So, if you look at the E5 skew for Defender for office 365 you have safe link, Safe Attachments. So, when a person sends an email with an attachment or a link it gets scanned prior to your end-users clicking on it. You have DLP, Data Loss Protection, (indistinct) everything you can validate whether it's going out or in, based on what is being sent and the context of what is being sent. So, once you have your productivity side secure then that's where the roadmap will shift. And this is where it depends on the direction the customers are going. If a customer has already implemented Teams and they're using Teams, then I would drive my journey towards securing the team's environment, securing the data, securing what users are doing. If they're not using Teams, then I would drive it towards modern management. Now securing the device, securing where users are accessing it from. So that depends on the path. Now, if we are going the Teams first route, I would look at the E5 skew of implementing things like cloud app security.
So, monitoring where users are logging in from, are they logging in from risky locations, right? Are they trying to download too much data? If you also look at Azure Microsoft information protection Teams is a collaboration platform, right? It allows you to share data with internal users but also external users. Most important part of that data is you want to be able to leverage the Azure information protection or Microsoft information protection and tag the data. So now you can determine where is the data going? Who is accessing the data? And most importantly, you can revoke it. And this is where you get the security of Teams with DLP, Safe Links, Safe Attachments, everything you set up for your email and everything else previously automatically works in Microsoft Teams. So, the E5 skew you're getting the integration and the consumption of that ecosystem all up together.
Once you have Teams and once, you're comfortable with the productivity side, now we can start shifting towards a modern management, leveraging the Intune or the Endpoint manager side of the cloud. But most importantly now pulling in things like the Kazbies of the world to talk to Defender ATP or Defender for windows 10. So, if a device has a virus, the device has been compromised you can block that device from accessing your data. You can block the device from even logging in to the cloud at that point, or most importantly you can force a user's password change on that device. Even though there may not be connected a proper network simply because they have a cloud identity. All of this technology and the journey you're taking, it's going to be different for you no different than it is for our company or another company. So, these are the conversations you have to have is where you're looking to go first? And then steer that journey. That's going to be the most beneficial to your end-users, meet your business requirements but also have quick turnarounds. Don't try to do everything at once. It's not going to be practical. Take small chunks and move down the road. So, you're completing that journey as soon as possible, but done not disrupting your end-users like we previously stated.
Anna
And I feel like for those organizations that really kind of quickly threw together a collaborative solution, the security components and securing that experience for end-users I think is a really great kind of first step or one of the things that maybe our clients should look at first.
Joe
I agree. And as much as we talk about the journey of the technology, I think the technology only takes it so far. Part of that journey is absolutely end-users. And this is where I'm actually going to flip the script right now. And turn the question back to you, is where do you see in this journey, the end-user involvement come from?
Anna
Well, if you are interested in getting any kind of a return on your investment and that's not just making sure that folks are using things. I mean, there are pieces of the Microsoft 365 license from the end-user perspective that can improve the way that you do business. There are productivity gains to be had. But obviously none of them, none of those things are going to yield any kind of a return if they don't adopt. Right? So, adoption is a huge piece of that. And we talk a lot about end-user adoption and the capabilities that exist in Microsoft 365 from a productivity perspective. I mean, in our own department here, we have been able to automate processes that have saved us significant amounts of money. And I feel like you could talk a little bit more (chuckles) about that but that's all using low no-code solutions that previously you would have needed an entire development team to get accomplished. I mean, we've talked to clients who development Teams didn't understand the capabilities of what is in the productivity suite things like power automate, power apps and we're able to really be a lot more efficient.
If you're not telling your end-users about these sorts of things they're not going to know, they're not going to use it, you're not going to get the return on investment. And the thing that I want to really kind of talk about today is that that starts with an attitude of empowerment from IT. And when we talk about adoption and managing change and all of that, I feel like too often IT is left out of that picture because it is assumed that they are just going to adopt whatever it is that that comes their direction. But it's more than that from an IT perspective I feel like we have a responsibility as technologists to take the information and the tools that are available to everyone in an organization, take that to the end-users in a way that's consumable and encourage them and empower them to use those tools. Don't make the assumption that things are too technical for any particular, part of your organization to consume. You never know who's there. And leading with the assumption that they will adopt is really the right way to go. No, get involved, get an understanding of the needs of your business, because IT is the business now it's not just a cost center that sits off to the side. So, empower those users. That's really the best way that you're going to get, you're going to take it that extra mile where your return on investment is concerned.
Joe
Yeah. And I couldn't agree more. I mean, if you look at, from an end-user perspective which is myself, things like you said, power automate. I would've never have known, and I shouldn't until I tried it and you always got to start small. Like I said, it's even the journey it's small, but start with little things and you'll see the end-users will slowly start increasing their capabilities, especially with a lot of the no-code low-code pieces of the Microsoft stack just to make their job much easier and more efficient.
Anna
And the way that I like to think about that in particular, when you start talking about things like power apps and power automate, and all the things that you can do in SharePoint, people start, you know, "no, what if my users asking me a question about it?" You know (chuckles) "what if I have to end up supporting it?" And the analogy that I use is, 20 something years ago when I started in the business world if you knew anything about Excel, about how to write formulas and, VLOOKUP’s and this and that you were considered to be way ahead of everybody else. I got an, I think the second like real job that I got was just based on my skills in Excel. And it was like, (exclaims) this really cool thing. These days, it's kind of an expectation, right? If you're coming into a knowledge worker role you have some knowledge and may not you may not be able to, do run queries and all the kind of advanced stuff but there's an expectation that you at least understand what it can do and basics on how to use it. And your end-user population is not coming to IT to first support for those types of things. And that's the evolution of these tools. If you look at it in that way and you encourage your end-users to look at it in that way, they can really improve the way that they are doing their jobs, the way that they do business.
Joe
No, completely agree. And thank you Anna for today. Thank you everybody for watching today's Tech Talk and looking forward to discussing more technologies and customer journeys with you have a great night.
Anna
Take care.
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Modern Workplace Director and Distinguished Technologist, Insight
With over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, Joe loves that technology constantly changes and provides new challenges, pushing him to learn more every day. As a leader for a vendor-agnostic organization, Joe is equipped to advise clients on the solutions that drive the best value for their business. He is a champion across many technologies and approaches knowledge-sharing not as a one-time project but as a continued mindset.
Services Product Manager, Insight
Specializing in communications and collaboration technology with more than 10 years of experience in the Microsoft space, Anna strives to help organizations understand how modern workplace technology can positively impact their businesses and employees.
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