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Rewrite your cloud horror story with Surveil

How Surveil Can Take the Horror Out of Cloud Costs

3 minute read

As with exploring any frontier, there can be many a danger lurking alongside your path to the cloud, ready to jump out at any moment. When it comes to keeping these costly cloud scares at bay, however, our users and partners have a secret weapon: Surveil.

In a world filled with secretive Shadow IT, spiralling cloud costs, lingering zombie accounts, and other IT horrors, it pays to have the right tool by your side for a jolt of reality. While Surveil isn’t a literal silver bullet, it can still put to bed many a terrifying threat to cloud harmony.

Keeping with the spirit of Halloween and the spooky season, we’re exploring the terrors and frights that Surveil has helped our partners and customers to overcome. Believe us when we say there’s a happy ending to this cloud horror story.

Neutralising Zombie Accounts

Zombie accounts – like their namesakes – continue to live long after they should’ve expired. They’re often found lurking in the cloud environment, draining costs by still having licences attached even though there’s nobody putting said licences to good use.

Identifying and ridding the environment of these zombies using Surveil frees up funds, adds a layer of truth to an organisation’s data, and allows IT leaders to reallocate licences to real users – bolstering the Microsoft investment and putting an end to undead accounts.

Locking the Front Door

Microsoft advises keeping global admins to a maximum of between 2 and 4, depending on your organisation’s size. Having too many admins can open up a barrage of security threats – meaning the terror really is coming from inside the house.

Monitoring and managing admin permissions and access is a key tactic to ensure you’re only letting the right ones in – and it’s something Surveil can help with, reporting on current admins and the access they have. From here, you can shrink your potential security nightmare by ensuring only the right people have admin permissions.

Taking Up Arms

With all the ghouls and monsters hanging about your cloud environment, waiting for a chance to get inside and cause some chaos, it makes sense to arm your employees with everything the need to keep the threats at bay. But are they putting security tools to good use?

Surveil allows IT leaders to monitor which security features are being used (MFA, for example) and by whom. Addressing the lack of uptake and the reasons behind it – including messaging and training – will help to limit the costly consequences of a data breach or cyberattack taking place because employees aren’t using security features. In short, arming them is only part of the story – and Surveil can help you to write the rest.

Stick Together

Like making your way around a haunted house, it’s not always a smart idea to split up – and that’s the same for the third-party solutions in your IT estate. While employees could be engaging unsanctioned apps (Shadow IT – a whole other challenge) under the radar, there’s also the problem of organisations spreading their solutions across Microsoft and a number of other providers. Ultimately, this can cause unnecessary costs and can spread the security perimeter thinner and further than it needs to be.

Surveil can help to build a case for consolidation, highlighting potential cost savings on offer while also offering a potential Microsoft Secure Score improvement resulting from Surveil’s recommendations.

Rewrite Your Cloud Horror Story

The cloud journey can be frightening, it’s true – but it doesn’t need to be. Surveil has already helped almost 200 organisations to rewrite their cloud horror stories, protecting against threats, recouping resources, and making the road ahead a whole lot clearer; there are no dark forests to navigate alone with Surveil by your side.

While this was a bit of seasonal fun, you can request a Surveil demo all year round – and find out for yourself how it can lessen the scares. Simply get in touch with our team, who are happy to help.

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