Microsoft Teams is one of the biggest business communication platforms in the industry, offering a massive number of features built specifically for workflow management, collaboration, data sharing, as well as third-party application integration. This kind of platform proved itself extremely useful when the pandemic was in full force, with a lot of people having no choice but to work remotely on all kinds of projects, and this made Teams more popular than ever before.
At the same time, this kind of explosion in user count made it so that there was a lot more pressure on the software in question to scale with the user count without making the user experience worse. The same goes for areas that Teams was not supposed to cover in the first place – and security is a good example of that, a field that is almost completely in the hands of the user (aside from platform-related vulnerabilities).
Since it is so easy to create new groups and teams with the platform in question, security is always a priority for companies that use Teams in their work. Luckily, there are plenty of third-party solutions that offer security features specifically for Teams. For example, solutions like NC Protect are a great way for any business to secure Microsoft Teams system with some of the most high-end security features on the market.
NC Protect is a solution that makes sure your Teams collaboration efforts are as secure as it gets, with the ability to adjust access permissions dynamically depending on who is requesting access and in what conditions. NC Protect uses Zero Trust principles when it comes to securing Teams to manage permissions in real-time, while also using Azure AD attributes and MPIP security labels to create a system with granular control over every single aspect of its security.
NC Protect makes it easier to convert channels from private to public and vice versa, it can also offer advanced chat blocking, channel archiving as a feature, single-channel access for Guest accounts, and more. It can even regulate permissions for the purpose of third-party data sharing so that every guest sees only what you want them to see in your internal structure.
Security is quite a sensitive topic for Microsoft Teams, and the steadily rising number of cyber crimes being committed on a yearly basis turns this topic into a legitimate concern, especially since the way these cyber crimes are getting performed also changes and adapts over time.
The traditional security model for all kinds of systems was always acting as some sort of an outer perimeter – a proverbial wall of security that protects sensitive data stored inside of it. This kind of approach worked quite well for years, but the widespread adoption of the Internet as a whole (as well as the development of remote work as a viable alternative) led to a specific variation of cyber crimes and data breaches appearing that these perimeters were not effective against whatsoever – insider threats.
“Insider threat” is an umbrella term for various data breaches that happen using one of the internal user’s credentials (the higher the permission level of the person in question – the more damage it could deal). Insider threat usually has three general categories of data breaches – accidental data breach, intentional data breach, and impersonation.
Impersonation may be the easiest one out of the three when it comes to explaining the nature of this data breach type. Impersonation is all about receiving the user credentials of a high-ranking system user to gain access to the system in question – be it via phishing, malware, or any other method.
An intentional data breach is a bit less obvious, since there may be many different reasons for a person with access to sensitive data to try and sabotage or leak the data in question – from a literal bribe to something less obvious, such as the sense of revenge against an unjust action from someone above them in the hierarchy. It is not exactly uncommon for this to happen, and preventing these kinds of events is an extremely difficult task.
An accidental data breach, on the other hand, is probably the least harmful type of data breach on this list, and it also may be the only one that would not be classified as cybercrime from the get-go. An accidental data breach is exactly what it is called – an accident, someone who has access to sensitive information performing an action that leads to some kind of sensitive information being leaked to the public. There are many ways for this to happen, with a mistyped email address in the “recipient” field being one of the more common examples.
All three of these data breach types would not be detected by a “perimeter” type of security system, because this kind of system does not perceive its own users as potential threats or sources of data breaches. This is also not the only reason why the traditional security system is not as effective anymore, with ongoing digitalization and collaboration being large parts of that same process. Luckily, there is also a completely different approach to security as a whole that has been gaining more and more popularity in the recent years – data-centric security.
A Data Centric security model (DCS) is created to secure the data itself, and not a specific location or a storage container, which is a completely new approach to data security. It may be somewhat new in general, but DCS has managed to quickly become a recognized standard for storing sensitive information that is already used by NATO and widely recommended by NIST as one of the best data security practices right now.
Data-Centric Security has a number of significant elements that are necessary for the entire system to work as a whole – including data discovery, data classification, data tagging, as well as ABAC, data encryption, DLP, Zero Trust access, digital watermarking, and more. All of these practices are perfectly represented by archTIS and their NC Protect solution, offering data-centric security approach for any company’s business needs.