Glennville Bank Strengthens Security Posture with CloudInsight™ M365 Security Basics
Our CloudInsight™ M365 Security Basics solution is helping community financial institutions increase their security posture. Take Glennville Bank, for example. The Georgia community bank, which has $312 million in assets, seven locations, and 66 employees, jumped at the chance to capitalize on the service to identify and secure threats to its Microsoft 365 settings. M365 Security Basics provided the bank with greater visibility into cloud security settings for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and M365 tenants through reports and alerts.
Like most financial institutions, Glennville Bank leverages technology to better serve its customers and maintain its operations. Also, like other institutions, the bank has a variety of Microsoft licenses, and managing the security settings for these products became difficult and time-consuming, particularly for Glennville Bank’s network administrator, Zach Horn, who describes his proficiency with Microsoft as “fairly limited.”
“Given the complexity of our cloud tenant settings, I’m not comfortable enough with Microsoft or their updates to manage every setting correctly,” Horn explained. “With all the potential security risks out there, I knew I needed reports that could help me identify risky security settings, monitor identity controls, and ensure our configuration matches our information security policy.”
With M365 Security Basics, Glennville Bank was able to set data trends and identify several settings that needed addressing, such as creating a baseline for failed logins. The bank also discovered that its user access details were often inconsistent, and through the M365 Security Basics service they received easy-to-follow instructions for correcting the problem. “Safe Systems did a great job fine-tuning the product to the demographic we needed,” Horn said. “Their knowledge has been helpful in pointing me in the right direction in knowing which Microsoft licenses I need to go to in the future.”
Product Highlights
M365 Security Basics is the first offering in Safe Systems’ CloudInsight™ family of products. It’s specifically designed for community banks and credit unions that have Microsoft 365 products (Exchange Online, SharePoint, or OneDrive), use Azure AD, and store non-public information in the cloud. M365 Security Basics’ reporting, alerts, and quarterly reviews are customized to help financial institutions improve their cloud security awareness by identifying potential risks and common signs of compromise. The product is developed by engineers who hold dozens of certifications, including the Microsoft 365 Certified: Security Administrator Associate certification. M365 Security Basics makes it easier for institutions to monitor their configurations for current and new features that are automatically enabled by major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure.
The powerful reporting from M365 Security Basics enables financial institutions to review vital Microsoft cloud tenant settings. This allows them to recognize unsafe security settings, examine identity controls, make sure their configuration is consistent with their information security policy, and demonstrate this to examiners and stakeholders. Reports are available as “Summary” versions (with brief information, such as the Tenant Summary and User Summary) and “Details” versions with more in-depth data. (Glennville Bank uses the Tenant Summary to highlight important issues during IT steering committee meetings.)
M365 Security Basics also offers alerts and quarterly reviews as add-on services. Alerts provide notifications about the most common indicators of compromise (like unauthorized access) and are grouped under Azure AD Roles, Azure AD Sign Ins, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online. The quarterly reviews give institutions a periodic, objective analysis of their recent M365 Security Basics reporting, so they can gain a better understanding of their Microsoft 365 tenant security.
CloudInsight™ M365 Security Basics not only helps financial institutions like Glennville Bank secure their information but also makes it easier to compile data required for examiners. Read the complete Glennville case study to see how your organization can benefit from M365 Security Basics.