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Myth-bust the top misconceptions about moving to the cloud
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Email security: Never more important
Email security remains as important as ever, with the majority of cyber-attacks, including ransomware attacks, still being launched through email using a combination of social engineering, phishing, malicious links and weaponised email attachments.
Email remains the easiest and most effective channel of attack with the number of emails being sent on a daily basis expected to surpass 293 billion by the end of 2019. Despite this, email is the weakest link in most organisations’ security strategies, with many failing to address vulnerabilities in popular email platforms such as Office 365.
With the reliance on email and associated threats likely to continue to grow, businesses need to address this threat with a combination of security awareness training and automated tools to reduce the likelihood of infection and speed up the detection of and response to email borne threats. Underlining the importance of email security, it is a core component of the UK National Cyber Security Centre’s Active Cyber Defence (ACD) initiative.
These are also closely related to: "Myth-bust the top misconceptions about moving to the cloud"
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A Computer Weekly Buyer's Guide to Microsoft Office 365
In this 13-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly shares:
- An overview of Microsoft’s subscription based software offering
- A look at how Microsoft Office 365 works and how far it has come towards being a platform for integrating other tools, both Microsoft’s own and those from other third parties
- A look at how Microsoft’s Secure Productive Enterprise license can help enterprises coordinate their digital transformation
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How to get the best value from Office 365
Microsoft wants people to move over to its subscription-based licensing for Office 365. In its Q1 2019 earnings, Microsoft stated that Office commercial revenue grew 17%, which it puts down mainly to continued growth of Office 365 in the commercial sector. In fact, Office 365 commercial revenue grew 36%.
As of October 2018, it has now increased pricing, the effect of which means that the on-premise Office 2019 product - which can be installed standalone on desktop and laptop PCs - is now significantly more expensive.
This means the cost of Office 2019 will increase by 10% over current on-premise pricing. The rise affects Office Client, Enterprise Client Access Licence (CAL), Core CAL, and server products such as Exchange, Skype for Business, and SharePoint.
Office 365 ProPlus for business starts at £7.90 for the core Office suite plus OneDrive cloud storage, to £9.40 for the Premium edition, which also bundles Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Exchange.
There are three levels of enterprise subscription: E1, E3 and E5. E1 costs £6 per month and only provides the web version of the Office suite, and online access to Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and Yammer, meaning it can only be used in a browser. There is a big jump in price to the next level up, E3, which costs £17.60. This allows the components of E1 to be installed locally. The £30.80 Office 365 E5 version is almost twice as much as E3. For that price the users can run PowerBI.
Just looking at the different product offerings and the massive increase in price between E1 and E5, it is clear IT departments need to have a firm grasp of how Microsoft Office will be used. Moving to the cloud with an Office 365 subscription means that one size is certainly not appropriate for all users. How many people can get away with just using the online products; how many need the on-premise version and which users actually require PowerBI?
In a recent article for Computer Weekly, David Chamberlain, general manager of SAM Services at License Dashboard, wrote: “By building a true picture of the organisation’s IT estate, the IT department will understand which software licensing can remain on-premise, which can be migrated to the cloud, and which software licences are no longer needed. So with the right subscriptions in place, Microsoft’s price adjustments could be unexpectedly positive, propelling an organisation toward a more modern, efficient way of working.”
So by understanding the requirements of different categories of end users, an IT department can ensure it purchases Office 365 in a cost effective manner.
