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Announcing the Microsoft 365 SMB Data Protection Toolkit

Announcing the Microsoft 365 SMB Data Protection Toolkit

Update March 2023: This product has been updated significantly, and renamed too. It is now called The SMB Guide to Data Protection and Microsoft Purview in Microsoft 365 Business Premium Plans. It still contains the written guide as well as supporting materials such as scripts and templates to help you...
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Automating third-party software deployments and updates with Intune and Scappman

Automating third-party software deployments and updates with Intune and Scappman

Hey folks! For those of you in my audience who work at Managed Services Providers (MSP's), I wanted to introduce you to a product called Scappman that I am really excited about. Rarely do I come across something like this, which solves such an important problem in just the way I...
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Multi-tenant management for Microsoft 365, and other things

Multi-tenant management for Microsoft 365, and other things

IT service providers are constantly looking for more efficiency, and better ways to manage their customers' hardware and software assets. In the Microsoft realm, we finally have Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, which is now in public preview. Some of my MSP customers have raised question marks around its current feature set...
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The three opportunities for MSP's moving forward

The three opportunities for MSP’s moving forward

The writing has been on the wall a while now; with a mass exodus to cloud services such as Microsoft 365 from traditional on-premises infrastructure, it was only a matter of time before those selling MSP services had to either evolve or die off. And with recent high-profile attacks against...
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Fast and Free Incident Response Tools in Microsoft 365

Fast and Free Incident Response Tools in Microsoft 365

As part of the SquareOne Summer Security Series, our group recently explored the topic of Incident Response in Microsoft 365. This was a very well-received course, and I felt a blog post was in order to cover off on some of the important content from that segment, which I think...
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Simple Sensitivity Label design for the SMB

Simple Sensitivity Label design for the SMB

In the recent updates to the CIS Controls (v8), one of the most noticeable changes was the re-prioritization of Data Protection (now Control #3, up from #13 previously). This control calls out a number of safeguards: inventory of sensitive data and data classification is among them. Sensitivity labels can help...
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Education and Governance: your weapons to combat fear and enable modern workplaces

Education and Governance: your weapons to combat fear and enable modern workplaces

I had lunch with a colleague recently who expressed skepticism over my (admittedly non-conventional) methods for migrating users from a legacy file server to OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint. "Some things work better in Theory than they do in Practice," he says. Well, that's funny because I built my method from actual...
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Updates to the CIS Controls and Free Microsoft 365 Assessment Workbook

Updates to the CIS Controls and Free Microsoft 365 Assessment Workbook

I know my community is already familiar with the CIS Critical Security Controls, as well as the free assessment workbook that I adapted from AuditScripts to apply to Microsoft 365 environments. This week, the Center for Internet Security released updates to the framework (we are now on v8). You can...
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Choosing (and implementing) your strategy for personal devices

Choosing (and implementing) your strategy for personal devices

In a recent Microsoft blog announcing some cool new discovery features in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, there is an interesting (but hardly surprising) statistic shared: your users are 71% more likely to be infected on an unmanaged device. Now the thrust of the article is around discovering assets in your environment...
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Moving to Microsoft 365 means getting to know your data (and your business)

Moving to Microsoft 365 means getting to know your data (and your business)

Through my website's contact form, I still hear about botched migrations to Microsoft 365 on a regular basis. This is usually due to exactly one problem: ignorance about the process, as well as ignorance about the datasets being migrated, as well as ignorance about the various tools that we have...
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