In today’s modern workplaces, employees are accessing more and more company resources from remote locations creating a greater need for enhanced security. In response to these workplace shifts, Microsoft added Conditional Access to business premium licensing in 2019. This allowed businesses with fewer than 300 users to gain more comprehensive protection of their company data while still taking advantage of the flexibility, mobility, and productivity that small businesses today require.
What is Conditional Access?
With a Microsoft 365 Business Premium license, you can enable a tool called Conditional Access to give your business control over the “where, when and who” may access company data based on user, location, and device identity. Conditional Access is a set of policies and controls that allow us to apply security when and where we need it and to the degree that we need it. Conditional Access enhances security without compromising convenience.
What kind of granular controls can we set with Conditional Access?
One example relates to Multifactor Authentication (MFA). We could create a Conditional Access policy for your MFA so that your staff does not get prompted for MFA when they are in the office — a trusted location or when they are on their company-owned computer, also a trusted device. With these settings in place, if someone tries to login to your Microsoft 365 from a foreign country where you do not have staff, they are going to get an MFA prompt. These policies add a significant degree of convenience while still having MFA in place. We are also adding that extra layer of security to prevent unauthorized access.
Another useful control is that we can restrict where your staff login from. If you do not have offices in Russia, there is no good reason for someone to be logging in from Russia. We can create a policy that does not allow individuals to login from certain countries. Further, we can create a policy that only allows staff to login from North America. If you do not have staff abroad, this simple policy adds another layer of protection without compromising convenience.
These are just a few examples of the types of controls that we can take advantage of.
If you would like to talk more about Conditional Access, or Microsoft 365 Business Premium in general, give us a call to chat about what is possible today.
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