With Q4 2023 almost upon us, whilst inflation may have fallen back, we’re all looking at how we can optimise our essential services. This month we look at auditing your cloud services.
Cloud AudIT
Most businesses and individuals will have subscriptions to multiple cloud services such as Microsoft 365, online bookkeeping and industry publications. As cloud services are generally easy to access, the number of subscriptions tend to grow over time. As this article highlights, businesses need to manage the risk and associated costs.
A good starting point is an audit of your cloud services, focussing on potentially reducing costs and improving security. Simply create a spreadsheet with these columns:
- Service (e.g. Microsoft 365)
- Purpose (e.g. email and file sharing)
- Monthly cost
- Administrators (list of staff with admin access to the service)
- MFA Admins (is Multi Factor Authentication enforced for all admins)
- MFA Users (is Multi Factor Authentication enforced for all users)
- Audit Date
Please let us know if you would like a free cloud services audit template.
WhatsApp (doc?)
Many of you will be WhatsApp users and, whilst it may be encrypted, unfortunately this doesn’t mean that the hackers won’t try and attack you. Action Fraud recently released an update about a scam targeted at community and religious groups – see here. Their advice is to make sure you have 2-step verification set up (this is sage advice for any application) and never share your account’s 2FA code.