Microsoft 365 Platform Review Service Acora

Microsoft 365 Platform Review Service

A proactive approach that identifies additional value from your Microsoft 365 Platform aligned to your desired business objectives

Part of Acora's Modern Work Services

An Independent and Trustworthy Audit

With a proactive and fit-for-purpose approach, the Microsoft 365 Platform Review Service provided by Acora focuses on platform security and optimising Microsoft tools.

As a flexible service that allows you to assign priorities to different areas of investigation, the assessment will provide an initial view of areas for configuration improvement that ultimately contribute to increasing security posture and decreasing business risk. To set the expectation for your business, the service will provide a report that outlines the recommended course of action for any of the identified issues and provide visibility of the areas where misconfigurations or lack of feature implementation are normally seen.

Our Recommended Guidance

Working Together Proactively

With a Microsoft 365 Service Review, there is no best practice to follow. The first step is understanding:

  • What you’ve bought
  • Why you’ve bought it
  • What you should buy

Then we can look at:

  • What does this mean?
  • What is the impact on my users and my business?
  • How does it affect business processes?

While several frameworks can provide guidance, there is not a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, we recommend working with an experienced partner like Acora to provide a fresh review of what your organisation would like to achieve from the platform, making use of new features and recommendations for configuration.

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Increasing your security posture

The Security Impact

Assessing the security impact is fundamental to assess, looking at what changes we can make to increase your security posture and decrease your risk.

When assessing these core factors, we want to understand your current way of working. This allows us to avoid any negative impact on your users and minimises any restrictions to your current process before we start implementing any new configurations.

Step 1: Understand how you want to work
Step 2: Start to implement this in the most secure way
Step 3: Roll out with minimal impact on user experience and process

Utilising our expertise and various frameworks

The Crawl, Walk and Run Approach

This approach allows our team to fully understand what your organisation wants to achieve, outlines the rules, and then slowly rolls them out until full enforcement is in place.

Crawl walk and run approach - crawl

Crawl

The crawl phase is all about development, assessing and understanding what you are trying to achieve.

Crawl walk and run approach - walk

Walk

The walk phase involves testing and rolling it out to the wider or whole community. This prepares for launch mode, ready so we can advise before anything goes live.

Crawl, Walk & Run Approach - Run

Run

The run phase is then to enforce the proposed implementation actions.

Microsoft Ecosystem enhanced with third-party extension

Acora & Microsoft: Better Together

Microsoft provides a range of products, services and capabilities for securing the modern enterprise and delivering workplace and infrastructure services.

As most customers are invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, Acora are best suited to advise, guide, deploy, configure and manage these platforms. However, Acora is also uniquely positioned to mitigate and enhance the Microsoft platform through best-of-breed third-party solutions that improved security posture and/or manageability of the core Microsoft services.

A Microsoft 365 Platform Review Service provides a trustworthy experience and identifies additional value from your platform, aligned to your desired business objectives. With the Microsoft 365 Platform being evergreen, there are new features being rolled out constantly and automatically without an understanding of which features are needed for your organisation and end users.

Providing an independent and credible review, our team at Acora will work with you to understand what you’ve bought, why you’ve bought it and what you should buy to get the most value out of your platform whilst also improving your security posture.

The assessment will provide an initial view of areas for configuration improvement that ultimately contribute to increasing security posture and decreasing business risk. We set the expectation that:

  • The final report outlines the recommended course of action for any of the identified issues.
  • Includes a flexible service that allows you to assign priorities to different areas of investigation.
  • Provides visibility of the areas where misconfigurations or lack of feature implementation are normally seen.

The Microsoft 365 Platform Review Service identifies common areas of misconfiguration and provides your organisation with a roadmap for resolving these issues, correct feature implementation to smooth the path when your organisation attempts to deploy new features in the future and the assessment can also highlight some common security holes that your organisation may be unaware of.

Regarding this service, we often see two types of common scenarios that organisations and their users will be in:

Scenario 1: Your current Microsoft 365 Platform was built and designed by your own in-house team
or by a third party.

If this is the case, our team will review your platform with a fresh pair of eyes. To manage the evergreen nature of new features and updates in your Microsoft 365 Platform, we conduct an independent and trustworthy audit. This audit assesses what additional value your platform can provide your organisation, making further recommendations to improve security posture and a more successful.

Scenario 2: Acora set up and/or manage your Microsoft 365 Platform.

If this is the case, your Managed Service with Acora operates on a ticket or request basis, meaning there is still a proactive need to review the latest features against what your organisation is trying to achieve. Utilising our expertise and various frameworks, our review service will understand if your platform is still fit for purpose and any new considerations that contribute to a more secure posture.

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