I wrote a 2 part piece on Australia’s Cyber Security Essential Eight and Microsoft over at 24x7ITConnection. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2, where I covered what the Essential Eight are, why they’re a risk, and where Microsoft can help in both a on-premises sense as well as cloud.

I don’t normally cross post from here what I write on other areas, but I put a fair bit of effort into writing this up, and thought it was worth resharing. Regardless if you’re Australian or not, our government actually has practical recommendations on what you should be looking at to harden your IT environment.

If you haven’t looked at these before, see how many of the eight you can tick off. If you can’t tick all eight, then I encourage you to work towards those gaps. Here’s what the eight areas are:

Application whitelisting

Patching applications

Office macros

Harden user applications

Restricting administrative privilege

Patching operating systems

Multi-factor authentication

Backup daily

All pretty obvious, but getting these perfect is still a very big undertaking. We’re seeing more and more security breaches in all different ways, so please don’t think of these items as ‘something to worry about later’!