Over the last year, the demand for cloud-based services and applications has dramatically increased and the need to scale pushed to new levels. We are moving away from an era where networks were clearly defined and usually specific to a certain location. Now there isn’t necessarily a contained/defined network to secure, but instead a vast portfolio of devices and networks, all linked by the cloud. Cybercriminals however are taking advantage of this shift, with increase occurring in DDoS attacks, ransomware and phishing campaigns.

With the trend organizations are looking towards a Zero Trust model, where instead of believing everything behind the corporate firewall is safe, the Zero Trust strategy principals Verify explicitly, Use Least-privileged access and Assume Breach.

In the Zero Trust model for Networks, there are three key objectives:

1. Be Ready to handle attacks before they happen
2. Minimize the extent of the damage and how fast it spreads
3. Increase the difficulties of compromising your cloud footprint

As organizations look to deployment Zero Trust framework for securing networks:

1. Network Segmentation: This includes apps and virtual network segmentation which aims to reduce the attack surface and prevent attackers from moving laterally.
2. Encryption: Enforcing encryption on the communication channel between user-to-app or app-to-app with industry standards like TLS/SSL.

1. Threat protection: Employing threat intelligence to help minimize risk from the most sophisticated attacks like bots and malware.

Get Started on your Zero Trust journey for Networks

1. Watch our Zero Trust approach to secure your cloud and hybrid networks webinar
2. Evaluate your current Zero Trust maturity stage to determine where your organization is and how to move to the next stage

Access the Zero Trust Deployment Guide for Networks for detailed deployment guidance.

The post Zero Trust for networking appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Cybersecurity used to be a lot easier. IT teams did their best to build a security perimeter—a walled garden—where they could treat anything or anyone in that network as secure. This classic approach of attempting to restrict everything to a “secure” network does not accommodate the modern world, where almost everyone works remotely from different types of devices, including personal phones and tablets.

In a recent survey, 76% of IT leaders current say Zero Trust is the backbone of their access strategy, with the shift to remote work accelerating the adoption with 66% of these IT leaders investing in Zero Trust in the past 3 months.  A zero trust approach helps strengthen user authentical, enabling secure access to apps and services and reducing stress on legacy remote work solutions.

Zero trust principals, Verify Explicitly, Use Least Privileged Access and Assume Breach.

Identities, representing people, services or IOT devices, are common dominator, and in a zero trust security model, function as a powerful, flexible and granular way to control access to data.

Five Steps to securing your Identity Infrastructure:

1. Strengthen your credentials: MFA reduces compromise by 99.9%. In the recent survey 63% of organizations have already implemented MFA to secure identities, as the first step in their Zero Trust journey
2. Reduce your attack surface area: Blocking legacy authentication reduces compromise by 67%.  Eliminating use of older, less secure protocols, limiting access entry points, and exercising more significant control of administrative access to resources can help reduce the attack surface area.
3. Automate threat response:  You can reduce the costs and risks, when you reduce the time criminals use to embed themselves into your environment.
4. Utilize cloud intelligence: Auditing and logging of security-related events and related alerts are essential components of an efficient protection strategy. You can use auditing to monitor user activity, document regulatory compliance, do forensic analysis, and more
5. Enable end-user self-service: As much as possible you want to balance security with productivity and you can remove friction from your organization by empowering your users while remaining vigilant

Identity is central to a successful Zero Trust strategy. Get started with your Zero Trust Journey with Identity:

1. Watch our Zero Trust Identity Webinar for details on getting started
2. Evaluate your current Zero Trust maturity stage to determine where your organization is and how to move to the next stage

Access the Zero Trust Deployment Guide for Identities for detailed deployment guidance.

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Bad actors want your data. While a lot of things can happen before a user or system get to access an organization’s data, data is still ultimately what criminals want; personal information, customer lists, credit card numbers, trade secrets – to name a few.

It is no wonder then, that protecting data is one of the primary responsibilities of organizations security and compliant teams. As organizations increase their digital transformation, there is an increasing adoption of Zero Trust principals for data.  Zero Trust principals; Verify Explicitly, Use Least Privileged Access and Assume Breach.

The core elements for a data protection strategy;

Know your data: Understand your data landscape and identify important information across your cloud and on-premises environment including, how your data gets used, what is critical, and what is sensitive.

Protect your data: Protect your sensitive data throughout its lifecycle by applying sensitivity labels linked to protection actions like encryption, access restrictions, visual markings, and more.

Prevent data loss: Apply a consistent set of data loss prevention policies across the cloud, on-premises environments, and endpoints to monitor, prevent, and remediate risky activities with sensitive data.

Monitor and remediate: Continuously monitor sensitive data to detect policy violations and risky user behavior. This allows you to take appropriate action, such as revoking access, blocking users, and refining your protection policies.

 As organizations begin their Zero Trust journey for Data the strategy needs to encompass your organizations entire digital state. 

1. Access decisions are governed by encryption – protect your most sensitive data with encryption to restrict access to content that sensitivity labels are applied
2. Data is automatically classified and labeled – to avoid issues with data not being labeled manually
3. Classification is augmented by smart machine learning models – with a vast amount of data reduce challenges to adequately label and classify
4. Access decisions are governed by a cloud security policy engine
5. Prevent data leakage through DLP policies based on sensitivity label and content inspection – such as sensitive information such as financial data, and credit card numbers

Get started with your Zero Trust Journey for Data

1. Watch our Zero Trust – Data webinar to explore data-centric security technologies like classification, labelling, encryption, and data loss prevention
2. Evaluate your current Zero Trust maturity stage to determine where your organization is and how to move to the next stage

Access the Zero Trust Deployment Guide for Data for detailed deployment guidance.

The post Zero Trust for data—classifying, protecting, and governing your data appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Through the new realities of working from home, organizations are seeing a substantial increase in the diversity of devices accessing their networks. In a receive survey, due to the pandemic, 86% of IT leaders say at least ¼ of their staff are connecting to the corporate networks through personal and shared devices right now. With not all endpoints being managed, or even owned by the organization, this can lead to different device configurations and software patch levels, increasing the potential attack surface.

Many organizations are implementing a zero trust security model where devices are monitored for health and compliance before granting access to corporate resources. Gaining visibility into the threat landscape is a vital step on this journey.

Zero trust principals; Verify Explicitly, Use Least Privileged Access and Assume Breach. In terms of endpoints, this means always verify all endpoints, inclusive of contractor, partner, guest devices and devices used by employees to access work data, regardless of device ownership. Gain visibility into devices accessing the network and ensure compliance and health status before granting access.

There are a few key rules for securing devices and endpoints in a Zero Trust model:

1. Zero Trust security policies are centrally enforced through the cloud and cover endpoint security, device configuration, app protection, device compliance, and risk posture.
2. The platform as well as the apps that run on the devices are securely provisioned, properly configured, and kept up to date.
3. There is automated and prompt response to contain access to corporate data within the apps in case of a security compromise.
4. The access control system ensures that all policy controls are in effect before the data is accessed

As organizations began their Zero Trust journey for devices, access our webinar where we walk through the several considerations for Zero Trust for device management and the steps you can take to implement based on where you on the journey.

1. Modern management – devices are registered and managed from the cloud.
2. Security configurations – On-prem GPOs analyzed and converted to modern configurations.
3. Conditional Access – Access is only granted to cloud-managed and compliant devices and apps
4. Device Risk – Endpoint threat detection is used to monitor device risk
5. Endpoint DLP – Data loss prevention policies are enforced for BYO and corporate devices.

A Zero Trust approach can significantly strengthen the security posture of your devices and endpoints.

Get started with your Zero Trust Journey for Devices

• Evaluate your current Zero Trust maturity stage to determine where your organization is and how to move to the next stage
• Access the deployment guide for Zero Trust for Endpoints

Leverage the Endpoint manager evaluation Lab Kit

The post Zero Trust for devices—new approaches for today’s new reality appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

The way we worked evolved rapidly in 2020. Organizations around the world have adapted and embraced remote work.  With employees working from home, being able to connect to any resource, on any device, inclusive of using personal devices, has become a productivity requirement to be able complete their work. In turn, IT still has the responsibility to find the right balance between enabling productivity, while maintaining control to protect critical data.

The average organizations has +1500 apps accessed by employees, which equates to over 80GB of data uploaded monthly to various apps. With research showing that less than 15% of these apps are managed by IT, it is no wonder why organizations are looking to a Zero Trust model for applications.

Zero Trust provides a modern alternative to the traditional way of thinking about cybersecurity that includes applications. Zero Trust principals; Verify Explicitly, Use Least Privileged Access and Assume Breach.

Zero Trust is a journey, and for Apps;

1. It starts with understanding your app ecosystem, apps your employees are using and discovering Shadow IT
2. Monitoring user activities and data
3. Automating data protection and governance
4. Protecting against cyber threats and rogue apps
5. Deploying adaptive access and session controls for all apps
6. Assessing the security posture of your cloud environment

Microsoft Cloud App Security provides you the ability to apply these Zero Trust principals across your app ecosystem.

Discover and control the use of Shadow IT; When it comes to apps, employees have easy access to both the consumer and business-to-business marketplace of software-as-a-service apps. With employees being able to access your resources and apps outside of your corporate network, it is no longer enough to just have firewall policies.

Discover and assess cloud apps in your organization by leveraging Cloud Discovery in Microsoft Cloud App Security. With Cloud Discovery set up, you will be able to analyze your traffic logs against the +1600 cloud apps in the catalog, which provides app raking against +90 risk factors to help assess the risk of Shadow IT within your organization.

You can follow this step by step Tutorial to discover which apps are being used, explore the risks of these apps, and configure policies to identify new risky apps & unsanctioned apps.

Monitor user activities and data; once sanctioned apps are determined, gaining a deeper visibility into these applications becomes important as this is where the most sensitive data resides. By connecting your business critical cloud applications, you can gain visibility into actions, files and accounts that users touch each day, and enable the admin to perform governance actions.

Automate data protection and governance; the power of automation cannot be underestimated especially as organizations expand and grow. By leveraging versatile policies within Microsoft Cloud App Security, you can detect risky behavior, violations, or suspicious data points and activities in your cloud environment. Additionally, they will help you monitor trends, see security threats, and generate customized reports and alerts.

Protect against cyber threats and rogue apps; by connecting your applications it enables you to detect and remediate against cyberthreats and rouge applications.  Attackers closely monitor where sensitive information is most likely to end up and develop dedicated and unique attack tools, technical and procedures, such as illicit OAuth consent grants and cloud ransomware. Organizations can respond to such threats with tools available in Cloud App Security, such as user and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA) and machine learning capabilities that are enabled out-of-the-box so that you can immediately detect threats, and run advanced threat detection across your cloud environment.

Deploy adaptive access and session controls for all apps; will enable you to stop breaches and leaks in real time, before employees intentionally put data at risk. Enable real-time monitoring and control over access to any web app, based on user, location, device, and app.

Assess the security posture of your cloud environment; organizations are not limited to SaaS applications, but increasing in IaaS and PaaS services. Assess your security configuration and compliance status across each cloud platform, and in turn limiting the risk by keeping the cloud platforms compliant with your organizations configuration policy and regulatory compliance. View the security configuration assessments and recommendations in Cloud App Security to investigate and remediate against any gaps.

Get started with your Zero Trust Journey for Apps:

1. Watch our Zero Trust – Apps webinar for details on getting started
2. Evaluate your current Zero Trust maturity stage to determine where your organization is and how to move to the next stage
3. Access the Zero Trust Deployment Guide for Applications for detailed deployment guidance.

The post Zero Trust for apps – discovering, securing, and monitoring every app you use appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

2021 promises to be a year of economic recovery across Canada. This Microsoft post offers six ways that small and medium-sized businesses can speed up their recovery.

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” – Stephen Hawking

2020 provided Canadian businesses unwilling or unable to digital transform all the evidence they needed of the risk of lagging. In a year when lock-down orders forced all employers to embrace remote working, organizations who lacked modern workplace cloud-based tools and enterprise security faced disruption and closure.

If you view technology as an operational weakness, not a strength, you can rewrite that story this year with these six recovery tips.

1. Don’t block your own recovery

Some decision-makers resist remote working and demand to manage people in person, believing that their oversight keeps employees productive. Analysis such as Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Teams may help them feel better. If employees can produce comparable results, where they work simply does not matter. In fact, collaboration hubs like Microsoft Teams can work like a charm and unlock big benefits, including the costs savings and time recovered from needless commuting.

2. Get expert guidance

Small and medium-sized business decision-makers defining their digital transformation strategy may want to tune into some recent presentations from recovery experts. Microsoft’s Future Now 2020 featured a bunch of inspiring sessions now available on demand. Browse all Future Now 2020 videos on demand here.

Future Now 2020 small and medium-sized business sessions

“Helping SMBs build business resilience” with Sharon Shoenborn and Hilary Zaborski discussing why digital transformation is more urgent than ever.

“Managing change through uncertain times” with Avery Swartz and Hilary Zaborski discussing the change in work dynamics and how we support communities.

“Living your culture in crisis” with Carolyn Byer shares Microsoft’s five-year cultural journey to create a purpose-driven mission.

“Lessons from the frontlines – In conversation with Shared Services Canada” with Lisa Carroll and Sarah Paquet chronicles how governments managed this year.

3. Improve your business resilience

Organizations that succeed in times of change have one thing in common: they are resilient. Discover how Microsoft solutions can help you strengthen resilience in people, teams, and your broader organization. Download The Future of Business Resilience ebook

4. Take advantage of free workshops

Microsoft Store offers free digital versions of its popular workshops for professionals. Every small and medium-sized business can take advantage of these workshops to build their technical skills and knowledge. Learn how to get the most out of Microsoft Teams, the secure collaboration hub, and other solutions like Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, Power BI, and more. Browse Microsoft Store free digital workshops for professionals

5. Embrace digital skilling and certification

Microsoft Virtual Training Days offers free Fundamentals classes and exams for non-technical professionals and Specialty classes for IT pros, in English and French.

Encourage every employee, not just your IT team, to take a free digital skilling class and to get Microsoft-certified. Employees who get technical training benefit from improved confidence and capabilities, which benefits the entire organization.

Microsoft subscribers, get the most value out of your solutions today!

• All Dynamics 365 users can access Dynamics 365 Fundamentals
• All Power BI users can access Power Platform Fundamentals
• All Azure users can access Azure Fundamentals

Azure Fundamentals – Master the most important cloud concepts and strategies. Enable digital transformation, collaboration, innovation, and better security. Unlock the world’s most transformative technologies with Azure.

Dynamics 365 Fundamentals – Become a digital transformation expert. Discover how to design intelligent systems using advanced analytics, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and mixed reality.

Power Platform Fundamentals – Discover how to drive digital innovation and automation. Connect all your data to analyze business performance. Build custom apps and automate workflows. Learn what Power Platform can do for you.

6. Step up your cybersecurity

Last, but certainly not least, make sure you keep cybersecurity top of mind. Cybercrime represents a clear and present danger to all Canadian organizations, big or small.

Start by upgrading the PCs you use to Windows 10 to help protect your organization from phishing and viruses. Learn more about Windows 10 security features

Then learn and teach your employees how to better detect and protect your business from attacks. Microsoft published the Keep your business moving securely series to help small and medium-sized businesses learn how they can practice business self-defense.

Keep your business moving securely series

1. How to work remotely, for everyone who needs to stay productive from home
2. Eight remote working essentials to stay productive
3. Your security checklist to help protect your employees working from home
4. Empowering Canadian healthcare teams with new remote working tools
5. Secure remote working solutions for government agencies
6. Secure remote working for human resources teams

If you need support

As always, Microsoft Canada is here to help. Microsoft Canada offers customers diverse options to get support. If you don’t have an IT company already, you can also get expert assistance from Microsoft’s vast network of certified solution-providers. Over 12,000 companies in Canada participate in the Microsoft Partner Network. Find one that suits your needs and wants at Microsoft Canada’s solution provider search tool.

The post Six ways to speed up your recovery in 2021 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

The second in our Keep your business moving securely series, this post offers eight remote working essentials to help you stay focused, productive, and secure from home. You can try out these tips at your business and/or share this post with anyone who may be procrastinating!

The legendary humorist Mark Twain once quipped, “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.” It seems Mr. Twain understood the procrastination problem, which can strike anyone, especially when they find themselves working from home.

Why do some of us tend to procrastinate? The answer may not be that complicated. With so many distractions on offer at home (kids, pets, Netflix, Xbox, phone calls, neighbours, podcasts, errands, appointments, exercising, meals, naps, laundry, and the list goes on) is it any wonder self-directed efforts fall by the wayside?

“Self-directed” says it all. Grouping into teams gives employees working remotely more structure, motivation, and support to succeed.

Instead of criticizing yourself or anyone else for procrastinating, take a moment to consider what’s missing: structure. Workplaces like offices and schools act as social networks, complete with expectations, rules, processes, hours of operation, meetings, whiteboards, and all the other mechanisms to keep people stay focused and productive.

When working from home for long periods of time, many people lose their sense of structure and, by extension, the benefits it yields. The goal then is to mimic part of that structure using technology and practices that give us the necessary human interaction and motivate us to deliver results.

Eight remote working essentials

1.      Get set up properly

2.      Schedule every day

3.      Share your screens

4.      Co-author with colleagues

5.      Keep records

6.      Encourage etiquette

7.     Automate your processes

8.     Practice business self-defense

1. Get set up properly

In our last post, we covered some of the remote working fundamentals including how to set up a productive, ergonomic workspace. Plunking a laptop on a coffee table or counter somewhere may seem convenient, but in the long run, a dedicated, quiet, ergonomic workspace provides the most comfort and productivity. If you can’t find a quiet spot, try noise-cancelling audio headsets or buds.

2. Schedule every day

Build structure into your day with healthy start and end times. Schedule daily status calls with colleagues. Use Microsoft Teams, the teamwork hub, to stay connected. Follow up via routine phone and video calls with your clients/customers and vendors. Set up formal and informal meetings to collaborate. And make sure to share and calendar with colleagues! Microsoft offers a step-by-step guide with a video on how to share your calendar in Outlook.

3. Share your screens

Go beyond your calendars. Get feedback in real time by sharing files and documents during calls. Microsoft Teams makes presenting files easy. To capture visual feedback, like comments on a website design, for example, you can use the Whiteboard app. With Whiteboard, you can insert a file, like a photo or design mockup, into your whiteboard and/or use different pens and highlighters to markup documents.

Break the language barrier with employees. Make your meetings more accessible. Use Presentation Translator to automatically display subtitles directly on your PowerPoint, in any of the 60 supported text languages.

4. Co-author with colleagues

Instead of circulating document versions by email, try co-authoring. Let’s say your company has a proposal you need to put together. Instead of tasking one person with drafting that proposal, build the file as a team in real-time in your productivity cloud together. With the modern version of Office, you can co-author documents and see who’s working on what. Welcome transparency and say goodbye to versioning issues.

5. Keep records

Speaking of transparency, did you know you can search people, meetings, chats, files, and apps from a single Teams workspace? Persistent chat threads capture and record your chats, including any links you share, so you do not have to search through emails to find shared information. With a single click, you can also record your meetings in Teams for future reference or get up to speed in case you were not able to attend.

When Office subscribers record calls in Microsoft Teams the recording automatically appears in the subscriber’s Stream, the video organization service in Microsoft 365. Stream allows users to view, label, tag, and share all their videos from one place. Stream can also auto-generate closed captioning transcripts to improve the accessibility of the recordings. In fact, subscribers can even access and edit those transcripts. You can visit this Microsoft support page for instructions.

6. Encourage etiquette

Like any professional meeting, online meetings require its participants to follow etiquette. Can your meetings benefit from applying these tips?

• Make sure to click mute. Staying on mute, except when talking, eliminates background noise and takes care of any potentially embarrassing sounds.
• Never put the call on hold. If you absolutely must step away to deal with an emergency, simply put the call on mute.
• Do not talk over others. Wait for an opening, and then identify yourself as you begin. Try to direct all questions or comments toward a person by name. Or you can use TEAMS’ newest feature and “raise your hand” to be given an opportunity to speak in a meeting room with multiple participants.
• Call in early and do not announce late arrivals. Eliminate the interruption and the embarrassment of people calling in late, including yourself.
• Send out an agenda and meeting materials ahead of time. If you use Outlook, you can add both an agenda and preliminary meeting notes via OneNote and attach files to your calendar item.

7. Automate your processes

Office subscribers can take advantage of powerful automation technologies and smart services to convenience their clients/customers. For instance, Microsoft Bookings gives small businesses (like salons, dental offices, law firms, etc.), who provide services to customers/clients on an appointment basis, the ability to streamline the process. This type of service can save business operators buckets of time fielding reschedule calls!

More technically ambitious organizations with Office subscribers should experiment with Power Automate. This clever automation service enables teams to turn repetitive tasks info multistep workflows. Organizations can use the templates in Power Automate to accomplish tasks requiring multiple applications, like:

• Save Office 365 email attachments to OneDrive for Business
• Send yourself a reminder in 10 minutes
• Get today’s weather forecast for your current location
• Get a push notification when you receive an email from your boss
• Send a customized email when a new SharePoint list item is added
• Record form responses in SharePoint

8. Practice business self-defense

Do not compromise your security just to get the job done. Instead, make sure you rely on technologies and practices you can trust. Adopt a layered security strategy. Use multiple layers of security together to better protect your business. Do things like:

• Keep your data and applications in a secure cloud, like Azure
• Use professional software and hardware with built-in security features
• Keep your applications, devices, and systems up to date
• Train every employee to spot and avoid phishing and malware
• Make sure you run antivirus software, like Windows Defender
• Use multi-factor authentication to control/restrict network access

Keep your business moving securely series

1. How to work remotely, for everyone who needs to stay productive from home
2. Eight remote working essentials to stay productive
3. Your security checklist to help protect your employees working from home
4. Empowering Canadian healthcare teams with new remote working tools
5. Secure remote working solutions for government agencies
6. Secure remote working for human resources teams

The post Eight remote working essentials to stay productive appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

The fifth in our Keep your business moving securely series, this blog post features secure remote working solutions from Microsoft, designed to empower Canadian government agencies facing unprecedented challenges.

2020 has proved to be an unusually difficult year for everyone, including Canadian civil servants and the agencies for whom they work. Governments (municipal, provincial, and federal) suddenly face dispersed, and often reduced workforces inundated with inquiries, requests, and demands for information and services.

Pushed to their limits, governments across Canada need to double-down on their efforts to digitally transform their practices and culture.

Fortunately, Microsoft has several secure cloud-based solutions to help respond to the current challenges as well as to allow Canadian agencies to modernize their operations in powerful ways. Agencies can create more transparency, improve their security and resiliency, and deliver a better experience for both constituents and civil servants.

Security, privacy, and residency

Agencies can protect the stakeholder data they collect and manage in the Microsoft Canadian Cloud. Since the company invests and maintains datacenters in multiple provinces, agencies can ensure the data they generate and collect stays in Canada throughout its life.

A powerful precedent

These qualities have compelled numerous government agencies, like Invest in Canada, to leverage the Microsoft cloud. This new government agency wanted a modern infrastructure from the ground up. They needed a highly secure environment that would support collaboration across the government and with outside entities.

Go beyond response efforts! Put a modern government workplace infrastructure with enterprise grade security in place.

Microsoft 365

Invest in Canada found what they needed in Microsoft 365 Enterprise, the integrated cloud platform delivering leading productivity apps—like Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—along with intelligent cloud services and world-class security.

The Invest in Canada team got the system up and running quickly with minimal technical and personnel overhead, providing 99.9 percent uptime and an ideal foundation for collaboration between potential investors and local authorities across Canada.

Dynamics 365

Designed to replace legacy CRM and ERP systems, Dynamics 365 gives you a suite of secure, cloud-based management applications powered by data and intelligence. Ministries, municipalities, districts, and similar groups can use it to unify data and technology to manage even the most complex cases and requirements.

Need to ensure compliance? Get Canadian compliance resources, including reports on Office 365 and Dynamics 365, in French and English.

Response management

Microsoft Power Platform, the platform to streamline app development, features a Crisis Communications Power Platform Template governments can use to manage the influx of queries, enable information sharing, and handle communications related to evolving conditions.

Using this template, employees can report their work status and make requests, as well as gain up-to-date information from both their agency and reputable external sources, such as World Health Organization or a local authority.

With organizations working in this high-pressure environment, the speed in which you turn extraordinary volumes of data into actionable insights is vital. Microsoft’s customer and citizen engagement solutions apply AI-driven insights that identify and automate emerging and time-consuming issues and monitor the impact of the strategies you deploy on your operations in real time.

Chatbots

Chatbots are ideal for stakeholders with lots of questions that require quick response. Using Power Virtual Agents governments can quickly create and maintain an intelligent Crisis Management Chatbot to help address predictable questions.

Solutions such as Customer Service Insights, Power Virtual Agents, and Portals can be deployed within hours with little or no coding required.

Process automation

From simple tasks to complex enterprise-wide processes, Power Automate enables everyone through low-code tools to build secure, intelligent, automated workflows to effectively manage highly repetitive, manual tasks supporting employees to focus on critical challenges and opportunities during times of crisis.

Cognitive services

Even the largest government agencies can rely on Azure for availability and scale. You can bring all your organization’s data sources together to drive actionable insights, including predicting demand. Through AI, Machine Learning, and Cognitive Services, Microsoft Azure has capabilities to support organizations.

Azure resiliency

With Azure Resiliency for Crisis Management, you can rely on high availability, disaster recovery, and backup to protect mission critical applications and data. Azure has ISO-22301 Certification, the first international standard to demonstrate the ability to prevent, mitigate, respond, and recover from disruptive incidents.

Get started!

Get resources and ideas to help you advance your digital transformation today. Visit the Microsoft Canada Government page to learn more about how governments can innovate to meet their mission and serve citizens better. Start your assessment now.

For the whole Invest in Canada story, visit: ”New Canadian government agency delivers modern workplace environment with Microsoft 365 Enterprise”

Keep your business moving securely series

1. How to work remotely, for everyone who needs to stay productive from home
2. Eight remote working essentials to stay productive
3. Your security checklist to help protect your employees working from home
4. Empowering Canadian healthcare teams with new remote working tools
5. Secure remote working solutions for government agencies
6. Secure remote working for human resources teams

The post Secure remote working solutions for government agencies appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Human resources (HR) teams have a major challenge on their hands this year. Transitioning quickly to a remote working model has been difficult for most. Without the structure of a physical workplace, employees can feel isolated and those feelings can build over time, creating a sense of alienation. Fortunately, the remote working technologies we discuss in this blog post help HR professionals empower their teams to connect, communicate, and collaborate securely.

The last in the Keep your business moving forward securely series, this post shares secure remote solutions and best practices for HR teams.

HR departments now, more than ever, need to protect the physical and mental wellbeing of employees. Employees need to feel connected to their leadership and each other. Clear and consistent communication will help, but it takes more than the occasional email or phone call to truly keep employees motivated.

Demonstrate you care about employees with clear, consistent communication, practical advice, and modern tools that inspire trust.

Security first!

Before we jump into the technologies, let’s start with a reminder to rely on cloud services and devices from a brand you can trust. With cybercrimes on the rise in Canada, every individual and organization should take steps to protect themselves from crimes like phishing. In addition to the practices we list in our previous post, make sure to look for Surface or Windows 10 devices, which come with built-in security technology.

Remember: Not every service or device your employees use will satisfy your security and privacy requirements, so make sure you give them the best!

Unite employees in one secure collaboration hub

Most Canadian HR professionals have used email, video conferencing, social media (especially LinkedIn), and other digital tools to recruit and onboard employees for years now. What has changed in recent years, however, is the rise of the secure employee collaboration hub. Unlike unsecure stand-alone solutions, Microsoft Teams works wonders on a cultural level across organizations, industries, and supply chains.

Microsoft 365, the integrated cloud platform, includes Microsoft Teams as well as the classic productivity apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint—plus intelligent cloud services and world-class security.

So, what makes Teams so effective? For one, Microsoft Teams connects organizations to collaborate by enabling employees to see each other’s status. And, those employees have their choice of communication tools–chat, video and audio calls. That alone is welcome news to any organization still paying for video or audio conferencing!

Cut down on email

But that’s just the start. Teams encourages users to create dedicated channels for internal projects, groups, clients, and supply chain vendors. In a dedicated and secure channel, users can chat by text, share files easily, and even use fun emoticons and memes to personalize their communication. And users can always access past conversations, search through chats, and even retrieve links as needed.

Do townhall meetings

Companies can use Teams to conduct townhall events as well. These all-employee events give leadership teams the opportunity to connect, communicate, and recognize team and individual achievements. They can talk about business performance, cultural priorities, and even share some personal moments (like employee birthday or baby announcements) to help everyone feel united and on track.

Conducting a town hall on Teams is as easy as scheduling a calendar event and inviting everyone to the meeting. Team live events can host up to an audience of 10,000 people, which means most organizations can use it to talk to all their employees at once, no matter how dispersed. Speakers can deliver presentations, share videos, and field live comments in the chat window during the meeting. And they can record it all.

Record your calls

Anyone who misses a townhall meeting, or any video or call you choose to record in Teams, can watch it on demand post event via Stream. This Microsoft 365 enterprise video service automatically organizes all company videos in one place. Stream can also autogenerate captions for your videos to improve their accessibility.

Manage employees

You can manage all your employees (and your entire business) with Dynamics 365 Business Central. The small-business friendly version of Microsoft’s digital transformation platform gives organizations a suite of secure, cloud-based management applications powered by data and intelligence. Decision-makers use Business Central to digitize their operations (sales, customer support, finance, etc.) and get a complete, accurate, end-to-end view of their business.

Business Central gives HR teams an end-to-end view of employees, starting with more insightful employee records. HR can organize and analyze employees by experience, skills, education, training, and association membership, enabling more informed project resourcing recommendations.

HR teams also like how Business Central simplifies and streamlines routine but essential parts of the employee experience, such as payroll, reimbursing expenses, and tracking absences.

Better HR insights

HR teams who want to glean even more information about their human resources can explore Power BI. Microsoft’s business intelligence platform enables HR teams to access easy-to-use self-service reports and views across their talent pool. Like finance and operations professionals, HR professionals can make more informed decisions based on meaningful and reliable data visualizations.

[description] Screenshot of a Power BI illustrative graphic featuring a chart with columns and text that show a New Hire Count, New Hires Same Period Last Year, and Actives YoY % Change at the organization by month.

The HR sample content pack for Power BI contains a dashboard, report, and dataset for a human resources department that you can download.

Keep your business moving securely series

1. How to work remotely, for everyone who needs to stay productive from home
2. Eight remote working essentials to stay productive
3. Your security checklist to help protect your employees working from home
4. Empowering Canadian healthcare teams with new remote working tools
5. Secure remote working solutions for government agencies
6. Secure remote working for human resources teams

The post Secure remote working for human resources teams appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Like so many Canadians, we’re overwhelmed by the courage and commitment of firstline workers, especially healthcare teams, across the country who put themselves at risk to support us all. We salute and thank you for your service!

The fourth in our Keep your business moving securely series, this blog post summarizes the Microsoft technologies and services healthcare providers can use to adapt to these challenging times.

Working in a complex, regulated care environment—made even more complex by current challenges—healthcare professionals need access to tools that enable collaborative workflows and the delivery of high-quality patient care. Both patients and clinicians need greater flexibility and convenience to connect with each other. And they need it all to be secure, reliable, and compliant.

Let’s explore how Microsoft solutions can support and empower healthcare teams to provide high-quality experiences, insights, and care—without compromising your security or your patients’ privacy.

Need support? Microsoft and our partners can help. Customers can contact their Microsoft rep or email us. You can also work with Microsoft partners specializing in healthcare, such as Dapasoft or ThoughtWire.

Put your security first

While it’s tempting to use any application or service that works, make sure all of the technology you rely on satisfies your security and compliance requirements. Healthcare organizations can provide their employees with access to key data in a secure, scalable, and controlled way with Windows Virtual Desktop. This solution stores data securely in the cloud, not on devices, which tend to get lost or damaged.

Stay connected with Teams

With people at home and in-person consultations minimized, video conferencing provides a way for clinicians to conduct virtual visits and provide people with advice and a diagnosis. Patients can safely and securely access their visit directly through the Microsoft Teams mobile app or their web browser.

The meetings platform in Microsoft Teams combined with the Bookings app enables providers to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual visits with patients. In fact, healthcare providers use Teams for more than chat, video, or voice calls. Teams allows them to connect, communicate, coordinate, access healthcare tools, and share documents, data with patients and each another—all in an efficient and secure way.

Employees can use the hub to receive direction, complete documentation, then access appropriate information from any device, securely, in real time. In Teams, you can even create tags and organize users based on attributes such as a role, skill, or location. Once applied, you can message everyone tagged at the same time in a chat or channel conversation. For example, you can message all @porters on a ward.

Learn more at aka.ms/healthcareincanada.

Get a healthcare bot to help

With the Microsoft Healthcare Bot, healthcare organizations quickly build and deploy an AI-powered bot for their websites or applications to deliver personalized, health-related information to patients or the public through a natural conversation experience. The bot can be easily customized to suit an organization’s own scenarios and protocols.

Microsoft Healthcare Bot uses artificial intelligence to help the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other frontline organizations respond to inquiries, reducing the strain on healthcare systems by empowering people to make better decisions. This bot is ideal for organizations that want to free up the time of their doctors, nurses, administrators, and other healthcare professionals to provide critical care.

Manage challenging times

Built with the Power Platform, Microsoft’s business application platform, the Crisis Communication App helps organizations coordinate information sharing and team collaboration and collects data about the safety of employees. Admins can publish updates and provide emergency contacts for different locations, and employees can report their work status and make requests to managers. You can even add RSS feeds with news updates from WHO, CDC, or local authorities.

With Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow), Microsoft’s task automation technology, enables you to create multi-step flows across services. For example, you can create a flow between emails, calendars, and spreadsheets, ensuring that the right business apps connect for maximum efficiency.

Explore remote assistance with holograms

Remote Assist on HoloLens gives remote health experts a real-time view of the world, so they can collaborate to solve issues faster and to enable quicker transfer of knowledge. It combines video, screenshots and holographic annotations to give frontline employees access to expert advice.

Healthcare resources from Microsoft Canada

Supporting Canadian Healthcare

Healthcare Industry by Microsoft

Industry Blogs – Healthcare

Live and on-demand healthcare webinars

Keep your business moving securely series

1. How to work remotely, for everyone who needs to stay productive from home
2. Eight remote working essentials to stay productive
3. Your security checklist to help protect your employees working from home
4. Empowering Canadian healthcare teams with new remote working tools
5. Secure remote working solutions for government agencies
6. Secure remote working for human resources teams

The post Empowering Canadian healthcare teams with new remote working tools appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.