Microsoft Security Services
Microsoft Security Services
Microsoft Security Services
Microsoft offers a depth of security services infused into both Office 365 and Azure. Today more than ever , security and cyber risks are top of mind. Not only for the teams in IT departments dealing with protection of intellectual property and access to business enabling systems. Many of these systems today are Microsoft centric or offer integration in the Microsoft Security services.
Security is not a once off engagement and need for form part of an ongoing operational engagement. For this reason iSquared run a Security Operations Center (SOC) and Network Operations Center (NOC) informed by thousands of sensors reporting millions of events. Presenting this information into real time dashboards , empowers security analysts to analyse the threat and elevate the severity based on the threat level.
Microsoft provide a rich set of tools natively in the platform and support for various third part security providers. Microsoft measure using the Microsoft Secure score,
Secure Score helps customers to:
- Report on the current state of the organization’s security posture.
- Improve their security posture by providing discoverability, visibility, guidance, and control.
- Compare with benchmarks and establish key performance indicators (KPIs).
Customers gain access to robust visualizations of metrics and trends, integration with other Microsoft products, score comparison with similar organizations, and much more. The score can also reflect when third-party solutions have addressed recommended actions.
Cloud Architecture Consulting
Good architecture is vital and is often overlooked by IT Professional who are focused on deadline and delivering services to the business at an ever-increasing pace.
iSquared customers benefit from nearly two decades of designing, building and managing Private Cloud Infrastructure against strict regulatory and compliance requirements. The team at iSquared consider the requirement to serve the applications as well as the resilience (uptime) and continuity (recoverability) services required to achieve the organisations goals.
Architectural consideration iSquared typically include:
- Servers (VM)
- Windows Servers
- Linux Servers
- Storage
- Managed Disk
- Block Storage
- Object Storage
- File Storage
- Network
- Virtual Network
- Load Balancer
- VPN Gateway
- DNS
- Express Routes
- Security
- Firewall Perimeter Security
- Vulnerability Monitoring
- End point Protection
- DDoS Protection
- Credentials Encryption
- Data Protection
- Backup
- Secondary Site Replication
- Archiving
- Identity Management and Access Control
- User Identity Authority
- Conditional Access
- Multi-factor Authentication
- Availability (Uptime)
- Uptime Service Level Agreement
- Disaster Recovery
- Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) “how much data loss is acceptable”
- Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) “ how much time loss is acceptable”
OPEX saving which in the cloud.
Cloud Tenant Management
Customers today operate predominately in a hybrid scenario and maintain some services in their own or collocated datacenters and have adopted some IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
At iSquared our customers maintain a mix private cloud infrastructure on premise, in collocated datacentres and consume a mix of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Each Cloud Service is typically consumed through the providers administration console and handles security, data protection and maintenance in a slightly different way.
Cloud Tenant Management is a service iSquared deliver to our customers to take care of the complexity involved in building, operating and optimising these cloud environments.
A typical blend of cloud service providers within our customer ecosystem include:
- Microsoft Azure Public Cloud Services
- VMware Private Cloud Infrastructure Services
- Microsoft 365 Productivity and Collaboration Services
- F-Secure Protection Services
- Mimecast Email Protection Service
- Veeam Data Protection and Ransomware Services
At iSquared we charge a tenant management fee where our IT Professionals handles the administration of the cloud services we reseller as a Cloud Services Provider.
paradigms as part of our daily operations, we maintain numerous customer premise datacentre’s , we run our own datacentre’s for resilience and disaster recovery and we run workloads across a number of Cloud Providers. This experience allows us to guide customers to consider their motivations and the business outcomes supporting the motivations. During a consulting engagement we will consider both the financial and technical considerations. We will consider your digital estate and how we realign the customers operations to support organisational alignment. Your technical team will need to learn new skills and the business operations will need to evolve to consume cloud services where it makes sense to do so.
Cloud Tenant Deployment
Once a customer has considered the business case and defined the success metrics the next step is deploy the services as per the Cloud Architecture.
iSquared customers benefit from our collective experience in deploying hundreds of tenants for our customers. The team at iSquared work on repeatable recipes designed to simplify the deployment and adhere to regulatory and compliance requirements.
Deployment focuses on configuring the new tenant with the features and services the customer needs and lists all the company employees and defines what rights they have on the tenant.
Cloud Adoption Consulting
While cloud services offer scale and reduced operational overhead careful consideration needs to be given to the business case of adopting these services. Failure to do so can result in escalating operational costs with little return on the investment.
iSquared consult to our customer on the business problem they are trying to solve. To achieve this we need to explore the overall strategy, business motivation and outcomes. Part of this process is reviewing the financial and technical considerations to support the business case when selecting which Cloud services or mix of services makes the most sense for the customers unique scenario.
Cybersecurity Consulting Services
Many of iSquared’s customer are bound by regulatory and compliance frameworks by established bodies or governments. This results in regular auditing of these controls and procedures. iSquared customers subscribed to our security services are internally audited as part of normal operations, in addition customers often engage external auditors to validate the finds and make recommendations. Our experience in this areas allows us to align the regulatory and compliance requirements with a rich integrated framework with machine and human generated reports as evidence for proof of execution. iSquared has developed its our framework that leverages a variety of ever evolving cyber and data protection framework developed and maintained by:
- US Dept of Commerce, called NIST or the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
- The Center for Internet Security CIS Critical Security Controls
- South Africa – Financial Sector Conduct Authority
- South African – Protection of Personal Information Act
- European Union – General Data Protection Regulation
Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Consulting Services
Customers today are still invested in their own datacenter facilities, many are thinking about and already getting out of the datacenter business. This has see the massive increase in datacenter facilities where customer can implement their own equipment in someone else facility with access to various global networks. This reduces the overhead of physical datacenter management, security , access control, power protection and cooling. Many facilities now offer uptime service levels better than those a customer could achieve in their own facilities.
While moving can offer some attractive benefits , many customer are still in the midst of a “return on investment” cycle and those on premise workloads needs to be maintained and integrated with workloads living in hosted facilities or in the cloud.
One of the biggest challenges is the various operating environments, on premise environments have been built and maintained over decades in some instances. These environments are optimised for the customers ways of work and are generally very feature rich. Cloud Services in contrast have the depth of services but consumption is on demand and priced as such. This will often lead customers to sacrifice features and services in favour of
Choose iSquared as your Cloud Solutions Partner
Moving to the cloud does not have to complicated, costly or stressful. iSquared offers businesses Cloud Based solutions that meet their unique set of needs.
Our team of experts consult and analyze your existing business and then find solutions that meet your needs and solve any challenges.
