Due to the pandemic enforced office closures, many organizations had to pivot from very few remote workers to nearly all employees working from remote locations. With more employees using different personal devices and more data moving to the cloud, there are more threats and security risks to think about. The necessity for a safe environment bolstered by high level security tools has become the need of the hour.
Microsoft 365 is a complete, intelligent solution that offers customers new ways to proactively protect and monitor the security of intellectual property and customer data.
The Customer
GAVS Technologies (GAVS) is a global IT services provider with a focus on Infrastructure Management, Cloud Integration, AI-led Managed Services and Digital Transformation. GAVS’ AIOps platform, Zero Incident Framework TM (ZIF), enables proactive detection and remediation of incidents and increases uptime, helping organizations drive towards a Zero Incident Enterprise. GAVS has transformed IT enterprise delivery through ZIF’s modules, to optimize IT infrastructure performance, prevent data disasters and enhance business services continuity.
GAVS is committed to help change how businesses organize their IT operations, bring meaningful and actionable insights through advanced ML for business improvements, enhance user experiences and reduce resource utilization. They have an offshore development and support center in Chennai, India, and a customer support team in the US, UK, UAE, and Oman.
The Challenge
Power Centre has been partnering the customer for several years now, paving a roadmap for cloud adoption and recommending best practices to leverage the complete value of the cloud.
The partnership with GAVS began in the late 90s. An analysis of their application landscape and scenarios by our technical consultants revealed that most of the on-premises hosted applications could perform much better on the cloud. The Power Centre team helped evaluate multiple solutions and finally proposed Azure as the best fit in terms of compatibility with their existing infrastructure, security, cost, and performance. The first Enterprise agreement was signed by the customer in 2015, as a part of their initial foray to the Cloud. The Power Centre team worked with their management to move to a hybrid landscape and incrementally accelerate their adoption of the cloud through various strategic initiatives.
GAVS has now fully embraced the cloud and enjoy reduced cost, infinite scalability, security and risk management. They appreciate the value in Microsoft security solutions and implemented the MS Defender for Office 365 (Plan 1).
The management wanted extensive incident response and automation capabilities, and the ability to give their security administrators more layers of security, control, and investigation while empowering them with the ability to further customize their security settings. The aim was to develop an improved defense strategy to build better enterprise resilience.
How the Workshop helped
Many customers do not have the full picture of the security tools available with M365 and other Microsoft products they already own, and how sometimes a simple upgrade to add on services could be a straightforward solution to meet all their needs.
The Power Centre team took the opportunity to showcase the extra abilities that come with the upgraded Defender for Office plans and how the organization could leverage the abilities to get access to automated investigation and response, create attack simulations to detect, quantify and reduce risks and integrate with the Microsoft 365 Defender.
The management was impressed by the extra abilities that would help them eliminate the manual effort involved in common email threat response and investigation tasks such as user-reported phishing emails, thus saving time, and allowing more effective use of their security resources.
The Solution
With Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (Plan 2), the customer is now able to
• Delegate the time-intensive tasks associated with investigating email threats to AIR – Automated investigation and response.
• Allow security teams to manually trigger automated investigations from the dashboard for any email and related content.
• Permit security teams to wait for completion of an automated investigation and simply approve or reject the automatically suggested actions to remediate the threat.
• Perform regular phishing and social engineering exercises as a part of ensuring and maintaining awareness of email and credential security within the organization.
• Get advanced reporting capabilities to gain insights into the threat readiness progress of employees with specific metrics.
• Achieve unequalled levels of interoperability with the integration to Microsoft Defender.
As a trusted security advisor, Power Centre Private Limited works with customers to understand the compliance and security challenges today’s organizations face. We give organizations the visibility they need to act against the ever-evolving threat landscape and perform comprehensive cybersecurity assessment, identifying key risk factors and helping the customer develop a comprehensive security roadmap.
“We were looking at a risk-informed approach to information security and the incident detection and automated response capabilities we get with the Defender for Office 365 upgraded plan, give us far more coverage than we have had before. We acknowledge the support of the Power Centre team who demonstrated the capabilities to help us gain greater visibility to protect employees and information.”
– Ravindran Girikrishnan, Senior Technical Manager – Cyber Security Operations, GAVS Technologies
