This year we reached out to professionals from organisations of different sizes and industries, asking them to share their experiences and concerns when it comes to Office 365.

Office-365-NZ-Auckland-Christchurch-Wellington

 
The survey was conducted online, with just under 100 professionals taking part - of these participants, 54% confirmed that they are currently using Office 365 in their workplace, and 21% partially using it.

Our main interests in this survey were consumer's common concerns, previous bad experiences (such as targeted attacks), and what they're doing about it.

 

Click below for the free downloadable infographic:

infographic O365 survey
 
First, lets discuss consumer concerns. As you can see above, concern in general is high with O365, with over 90% of respondents showing worry over 3 different areas - Phishing, Malware in emails, and Ransomware. Concerns like these are unsurprising and are very rational when you look at the effects these attacks can have on businesses - for example, Ransomware shuts down 1 in 5 small businesses after it hits.

Despite these concerns, 91% of participants stated that they aren't using Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection, which helps to protect against unknown malware and viruses. Also, 54% of people said they aren't implementing DMARC - the email authentication service which helps to prevent email spoofing, such as Phishing attacks.

As for real previous experiences, we asked participants whether they had been targeted by Spear Phishing, impersonation, or social engineering attacks - a shocking 48% responded that they had been victims of CEO/staff impersonation, which can lead to major data breaches like it did for Snapchat in 2016. Also, 27% had previously dealt with Spear Phishing attacks, and 16% social engineering attacks.

We also asked whether people had been targeted by Ransomware in the past, which, as we already mentioned, can quickly shut down a small business. 38% of respondents shared that they had in fact fallen victim to Ransomware, with 56% saying that these attacks had come through either emails, web traffic, or network traffic.

Finally, we get to the most significant section of our survey - what are people doing about these concerns?
We've already mentioned the lack of ATP and DMARC implementation, but we also asked people about their third-party solutions.

Despite Spear Phishing being the most common concern amongst our respondents - 94% to be exact - when asked about third-party solutions, 47% admitted that they lack this kind of protection. On a more appeasing note, most people did state that they train their employees on Phishing prevention, but only 20% use third-party solutions for this too.

Another essential use of third-party solutions is for security, archiving, and backup - implementing this properly can prevent data loss; an issue that can be detrimental to businesses. However, 64% of our survey respondents said that they don't have this security, and 43% said they aren't planning to anytime soon.

 

If you're concerned about the security of your Office 365, Altinet Ltd offer a solution with Barracuda Essentials, an all-around service including Email Security, Advanced Threat Protection, Cloud Archiving, and Cloud-to-Cloud Backup.