Home » Cybersecurity » Governance, Risk & Compliance » Managing O365 and G Suite Across Client Organizations

Managing O365 and G Suite Across Client Organizations

As an MSP, you need to be able to tailor your identity management capabilities to your clients’ needs, including their choice of productivity suite. In most cases, this split boils down to Office 365™ (O365) or G Suite™ — and sometimes the choice is both. That’s why MSPs need a unified solution for managing O365 and G Suite across client organizations.

The Need for Productivity Suite Identity Management

Securing identities for productivity suites like O365/G Suite is crucial for any business. After all, they often store critical, confidential company information in the form of files or emails. This material could range anywhere from C-suite communiques to finance spreadsheets or product messaging documents. Regardless of where it comes from, this data is compromising for an organization, and subsequently their MSP.

Unfortunately, we live in an era of data breaches. Identities are the No. 1 target for bad actors, so managing identities properly is paramount for any IT organization. In the past couple years, MSPs and their clients have been a top target for attackers as well. For instance, a recent attack via compromised identities on RDP ports exposed a Spanish MSP and their clients to ransomware.

Identity Management Needs

As such, managing identities for O365, G Suite, and other resources is key to organization and client security. Although identity management encompasses a wide range of requirements, a couple of critical tasks include:

• Password Management
  • Strong, complex passwords required at all logins
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
  • “Something you have” in addition to “something you know”
• Authoritative Identity Sync
  • All identities need to tie into an identity provider

MSP Difficulties with O365/G Suite Identity Management

MSPs, whether they have dozens of clients or just a couple, need to manage each individual client’s productivity suite instances. Both O365 and G Suite feature multi-tenant admin consoles, but those still (Read more...)