SoftwareOne services make it easy to adopt Microsoft Defender for Business

Small and medium businesses can have increased cybersecurity through Microsoft Defender for Business

As cyberattacks skyrocket along with data-breach costs, security is increasingly business-critical.

In recognising that need, Microsoft has released its Defender for Business for small and medium businesses (SMBs) with up to 300 users. Defender for Business is now available standalone and as a part of Business Premium.

There has been a 300%+ increase in cyberattacks, where more than 50% target specifically SMBs. One key point that’s often overlooked is that the average cost of an SMB data breach is $108,000, which is a serious threat to a business’ livelihood.

The landscape for businesses is even more challenging as employees increasingly work from home and access business-relevant data and systems from private devices as well as private networks. It can make operating and securing modern and digital business environments very complex.

While enterprise security solutions often entail a high degree of complexity and relevant costs, SMBs often have small IT teams that are not equipped with the right set of knowledge and tools to maintain an adequate cybersecurity posture. Those circumstances can make it easier for cybercriminals to target SMBs.

Defender for Business offers an affordable, enterprise-grade endpoint security solution that is also easy to govern. Defender for Business combines advanced features for SMBs to prevent, detect, and respond to cybersecurity threats. It simplifies much of the endpoint security workflows with automation and features, making prioritisation and response actions effective. It provides SMBs with real-time visibility to vulnerabilities and offers means to further harden endpoints against security threats.

Defender for Business also makes the expansion of cybersecurity use cases easier as it fits well with leading security solutions from Microsoft for protecting other critical domains like email and more.

As SMBs often turn to partners for IT management, Defender for Business comes with the capabilities to outsource the endpoint security management and operations to IT partners.

Benefits for Defender for Business for partners

Defender for Business enables partners to manage their SMB customers’ security at scale. The solution integrates with Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, offering partners an aggregated condensed view of their end-customer Microsoft 365 environments. That way, partners can view security incidents in their admin portal and respond to security threats in real-time.

To accelerate our partner's time to market and remove the complexity from the cybersecurity domain, SoftwareOne has a new Architected Accelerator that offers SoftwareOne customers and partners best-practise adoption for Defender for Business. A private preview of Defender for Business showed that partners highly value the solution and look to IT service providers like SoftwareOne to provide speed and ease of automating relevant parts of the deployment and configuration. The partners also liked that companies such as SoftwareOne could offer guidance for the parts that can’t or should not be automated.

Every step from preparation to deployment and configuration is documented. In addition, SoftwareOne's Defender for Business Accelerator offers content for further usage support.

SoftwareOne is committed to creating business value for its partners and end customers. Being able to offer Defender for Business is yet another example of that commitment. To find out more or to sign up for cybersecurity webinars, visit here.

Footnotes

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, 06 May 2021 ABC report

Kaspersky Global Corporate IT Security Risks Survey, 2019