Maintain cyber resilience and productivity during COVID-19

Hello. My name is Dan Gauntner, and I'm a senior product marketing manager with Quest Software. I'm joined by Jennifer LuPiba, the chair of our Quest Customer Advisory Board. And today we're going to discuss the challenges that our customers are facing during this COVID-19 global health crisis as well as recommended solutions. Jennifer, welcome. Thank you, Dan. So let's get right down into it. The COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders are driving more remote work than ever, and this is disrupting IT priorities. What are you seeing from our customers as far as what they're prioritizing but also deprioritizing as it relates to their Active Directory and Office 365 environments? Well, the general consensus from the customers I'm speaking with is that all nonremote access projects are being pushed to the back burner so that they can focus on maintaining those critical systems that users need to gain productivity at home. And what's the impact of this sudden shift in priority? Well, IT pros are overburdened, and end users are finding a huge upheaval in their work and personal lives. And all of this means is that more security training is being forgotten, and people are taking shortcuts to get work done. So that means more errors, and more holes, and a suddenly expanded attack surface because of all those personal devices and new remote connections into your network. And as we've seen, Dan, bad actors are not letting a crisis go to waste with COVID-19 phishing and malware scams. And so what is Quest recommending to our customers during this time? So first and most importantly is MFA. Protect your Microsoft cloud. Enable multifactor authentication for your Office 365 environment. Microsoft has reported that 1.2 million Azure Active Directory accounts are compromised every month, and they say that there's a 99.9% likelihood that multifactor authentication was not enabled. So to help protect, in addition to MFA, to help protect your Active Directory and Azure AD accounts from compromise, you also need to monitor your workstations and then put in automated tasks and responsive actions to stop suspicious processes and activities. And then you also need a recovery plan in place at multiple levels. Also, customers need to enable the remote worker and reduce their dependency on VPN. So get all that data that's in those files shares into Office 365. Also, monitor those remote workers to help identify those who are struggling with remote work, who are overcompensating, burning the candle at both ends, and burning out. And finally, manage, manage, manage your Office 365 licenses so that the people-- the right people have access to the right services to do the work that they need to do. And hey, thanks, Jennifer, for tremendous insight. And, folks, if you want to learn more about how Quest can help you with these recommendations, visit Quest.com/Microsoft-Remote-Workforce-Solutions. Thanks for watching this video.