There is a new, growing attack surface that is becoming increasingly dangerous to your network operations—the cloud, specifically your Google Apps or Microsoft 365 cloud instances.
I have read commentary that M365 is believed to have the greater attack surface. It has more going on, so at some level, that is believable to me. However, Google Apps has had its issues, too. Then there is the concern about confidential, personally identifiable, and financial information data leaks through OneDrive and Google Drive. In New York, we have EdLaw 2-d and the need to align with NIST CSF standards as well.
We have encountered several public hacks in government and industry that have potentially significant long-term consequences.
Protecting this space will be an investment every district must make.
Most vendors only do M365 due to its overwhelming commercial usage. While some of you use Microsoft 365, most districts are squarely Google Apps shops. The other sad reality is that most vendors who provide this protection want you to license 100% of your Google Apps or M365 users, which will blow your budget.
For about a year now, I have been talking to vendors in this space, trying to help them understand how K-12 works.
From that journey, CSI has developed two very exciting new offerings that can protect those in your organization who need advanced cloud protection at an affordable price.
CSI's new CSMDR service, powered by Blackpoint Cyber, provides M365 or Google Apps cloud protection for every protected endpoint, backed up by a full-remediation Security Operations Center. We can also provide cloud-only protection to named users. That means you should be able to add this protection for your administrators and those with access to financial, confidential, or personally identifiable information and not pay exorbitant licensing fees for your K-12 students!
CSI's new Managed XDR service integrates M365, and Google Apps feeds as telemetry streams into the BlueShift Cybersecurity SOC.
We continue to strive to bring you world-class products that will help you stay one step ahead of the bad guys.
The reality is that you are going to need to add this cloud protection overlay to your security stack from someone to reasonably consider your district protected. Asking about M365 and Google Cloud protection should be part of your ongoing security planning discussions.
We believe we have an excellent way to address this growing requirement.
Please give us a call. We are happy to show you what we have been working on and how it fits into a complete network protection strategy.
-Scott Quimby, CISSP
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