Office 365 security

I have been talking with potential customers this week over their requirements for future IT and it became obvious that a Cloud solution was what was needed - specifically Office 365.

One thing that has come up time and time again were the questions "how secure is it?" and "we work with clients who might not think this is secure enough - is it?".

So I have taken the time to research this and as you might think Microsoft has produced the most comprehensive and high quality information on this - so I have taken some of this from Microsoft and reproduced it here for people to have an overview of Office 365 security. You maybe sceptical about Microsoft telling you how great Microsoft Office 365 security is, but what they say here makes sense and is logical and relevant and I believe provides good detail and explanation to most security questions.



"With Office 365, it’s your data. You own it. You control it. And it is yours to take with you if you decide to leave the service. The core tenets of our approach to earning and maintaining your trust are:

 Built-in Security :

Office 365 is a security-hardened service, designed following the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle. We bring together the best practices from two decades of building enterprise software and managing online services to give you an integrated software-as-a-service solution.

At the service level, Office 365 uses the defense-in-depth approach to provide physical, logical, and data layers of security features and operational best practices. In addition, Office 365 gives you enterprise-grade, user and admin controls to further secure your environment.

Service-level security through defense-in-depth

Customer controls within the service

Security hardening and operational best practices

 Privacy by design :

When you entrust your data to Office 365 you remain the sole owner of the data: you retain the rights, title, and interest in the data you store in Office 365. It’s our policy to not mine your data for advertising purposes or use your data except for purposes consistent with providing you cloud productivity services.

Your data is not used for advertising

You have extensive privacy controls

You can take your data with you when you want

Continuous Compliance

Office 365 is a global service and continuous compliance refers to our commitment to evolve the Office 365 controls and stay up to date with standards and regulations that apply to your industry and geography. Because regulations often share the same or similar controls, this makes it easier for Microsoft to meet the requirements of new regulations or those specific to your organization and industry.

In addition, Office 365 provides admin and user controls, including eDiscovery, legal hold, and data loss prevention, to help you meet internal compliance requirements. These require no additional on-premises infrastructure to use.

Proactive processes to meet your compliance needs

Customer controls for organizational compliance

Independently verified to meet evolving standards

Transparent Operations

Moving to a cloud service shouldn’t mean losing access to knowing what’s going on. With Office 365, it doesn’t. We aim to be transparent in our operations so you can monitor the state of your service, track issues, and have historical view of availability.

You know where your data resides and who has access

Visibility into availability and changes to the service

Financially backed guarantee of 99.9% uptime"

If you would like to read even more detail about the security that wraps Office 365 up then please go to https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-trust-center-cloud-computing-security?tab=7d4bf5d5-8549-acb8-3852-a62cc997fb45

I hope this has reassured anybody who has previously had doubts about Office 365 Cloud security and now understands that a great deal has been done to make O365 a robust and secure product that can be used with safety and reassurance.

 

shop window and Internet webpage - analogy

Whilst working with a website builder to have a new website built I have realized that a website serves the function of a shop window. This is perhaps nothing startlingly new in terms of a concept but the analogy is so strong with me, as I work on my new shiny website that I thought I had to share this concept.

40 years ago the high street represented the current internet, with all those glowing, interesting shop windows showing off their wares and beckoning you into the shop to peruse and perhaps purchase. Now we have the same as we surf the internet, all those Homepages enticing and beckoning you to purchase their goods or services and if not then at least to enjoy the front page.

So I have used this as my driver, the definition of my website Homepage as a shop front and all the various hyperlinks and sub-sets, products and services that are available to the surfing potential customer who cares to open the door and step inside.

I keep this thought close to my heart when I decide on how my website looks and feels and operates; hopefully this is what encourages people.

CRM Guide for Small Business

CRM Guide for Small Business

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and covers methods and technologies used by companies to manage their relationships with clients. In technology terms a CRM system usually refers to the software to help manage this process.

CRM systems vary massively in what they do but in simple terms they store current and historical information on existing (and sometimes potential) customers. Most CRM systems also enable information about those customers to be extracted and reported on in various ways. Additional features of more sophisticated CRM systems include:

1. Workflow automation – ensures the business follows a set of steps by automatically leading the users in one or more departments through proven and agreed processes.
2. Marketing - generate automatic personalized marketing based on the customer information stored in the system.
3. Product and service information - stores information about your products and services, and enable relationships between these and your customers to be set up to enable quotes, invoices, etc to be automated.
4. Sales force automation – the entire sales cycle can be automated, tracked and measured.

Unfortunately many SMEs rely on numerous spreadsheets and disparate pieces of software to help run their businesses and those that do have a true CRM system rarely maximise its use.
A well designed and fully utilised CRM system can transform a business by massively improving customer service and providing valuable insight into business performance.

So what should SME’s focus on when considering implementing a CRM system?

1. Make sure your business processes work There is no point in implementing a CRM system that reflects a bad process. Make sure that the way your business processes work is effective and then make the CRM system reflect or, if possible, improve on this.
2. Understand your real business goals and communicate them Make sure that when you implement a system you know exactly what you are trying to achieve in real business terms (E.g. Speed up the quotation cycle) and communicate these goals to staff and the CRM provider. Don’t implement technology for technology’s sake!
3. Focus on your customers Remember a CRM system should make things better for your customers, not worse. Sometimes internal issues take over and the result is a system that does nothing to help the customer. Improve the customer experience and the rewards will come back to the business.
4. Get “buy in” from your staff Most staff are very good at what they do and know what will and won’t work. Engage your staff so they can see how this will improve things and if they have concerns, don’t assume they are awkward and against change, they may have some great ideas.
5. Keep it simple Many CRM systems offer an incredible array of functionality but for most businesses this just serves to confuse. Don’t be taken in by wonderful looking systems with bells and whistles. Think about your business and what it needs, think about your customers and think about your staff. Keep it simple to maximise its effectiveness.

Where can a CRM system make a positive impact?
The most basic CRM system will contain all current and historical information about a customer enabling any member of staff to have instant access to what they need to provide and personal and knowledgeable experience for the customer. How many times have you been frustrated at having to repeat information to a company representative? Just this simple availability of information can speed up internal processes, improve customer perceptions and ultimately lead to increased business.
A web based CRM system (which we highly recommend) improves access to information which can aid with flexible working practices and can speed up service delivery. For example, compare a sales team that whilst out with customers are able to instantly access all the information required to produce a personal quote, which the customer can sign then and there, to a team that has to go back to the office to prepare and send the quote. The flexible and responsive team will save time and close more business.

By linking products to customers the system can automate quotes and invoices which saves time and reduces errors.

Finally, reporting can provide an invaluable insight into how you can improve your business. For example, you can determine the profile of the customers that are your most profitable, you can see which marketing source produces the most or best quality leads, you can see which staff deal with the most calls, and so on.

To summarise, if you don’t have a CRM system then you need one, if you do have one then check that you’re making the most of it.