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.

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Cybersecurity used to be a lot easier. IT teams did their best to build a security perimetera walled gardenwhere 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.

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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 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

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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.

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CCC delivers unparalleled results, but is always looking for the most effective and efficient way to help clients. It uses outcome measurement and tracks client progress at every session, and its pre-pandemic client outcomes outperformed the published benchmark by 37 per cent. But in light of changed work practices forced by the pandemic, CCC had been experimenting with technologies for remote audio and video communications to broaden its counselling options. When in-office consultations were ruled out, staff already had ideas for best practices that could help keep services available, especially in light of heightened demand during these difficult times. The organization needed a secure solution that was easy for clients and counsellors from all cultural and economic backgrounds to use.

CCC decided to standardize on Microsoft Teams, making the solution available to administrative staff and all 65 in-house and student counsellors. "We migrated everybody into Teams and rolled it out within 36 hours," says Chief Information Officer Neil Wagner. The rollout went very smoothly; counsellors booked appointments online, clients clicked provided links, and sessions took place in the browser without the need for additional software installation. Those who needed technical help received it very quickly, and counsellors themselves soon gained the confidence to help fix any issues: "I would say probably three quarters of the sessions were no problem. We just had to teach our counsellors enough so that they could be the tech support people for their clients," adds Wagner. More recently, CCC added voice features (PSTN), rounding out the solution with Calling for Microsoft Teams to provide a seamless, unified communications experience for everyone at the Centre.

To date, more than 45,000 virtual counselling sessions have been successfully completed using Teams. For clients, the online meeting experience is not the same as its conventional in-office counterpart, but CCC data has shown it to be equally if not more effective. CCC has always conducted rigorous results and performance analysis, and CEO Dr. Robbie Babins-Wagner discovered that online consultations have actually provided a boost to counsellors' effectiveness, creating better outcomes for clients. "Clients last year shared more mental health distress than people in the pre-pandemic time. With online counselling using Teams, their outcomes were equal, if not better than during pre-pandemic times or in-person care. So, we're now doing online care by choice," she says.

It was critical that CCC maintained its clients' privacy on the new platform. Wagner insisted that security was paramount, and one of the main reasons Teams stood out from the other available technologies. In fact, he says emphatically, it may have been three of the reasons: "We could only select one solution for virtual communications, Teams was by far the best fit. And security, security, security!" Dr. Babins-Wagner added that security and privacy are fundamental principles in counselling, particularly so at CCC. "I think the counsellors needed to have full confidence in the security of Teamsjoining, during, and leaving a call. That's what they're grilled in. 'How are we going to do this securely?'"

CCC now considers Teams a key tool in its counselling and education practice for collaboration among staff and students. After an easy deployment, the organization saw quick benefits in simplified management and swift adoption. Beyond face-to-face client sessions, Dr. Babins-Wagner notes she uses Teams Planner and sharing features to work with external partners and internal colleagues alike. And students get more secure, straightforward meetings and document sharing with their supervisors. Dr. Babins-Wagner thinks the CCC experience with Teams has made it a permanent part of future operationsit's an effective, efficient way to reach more clients and achieve even better results in pursuit of the Centre's mission. "We're going to give clients a choice about whether they want to receive their services virtually or in person. And I expect that the majority of clients are going to want to do it virtually."

Visit Calgary Counselling Centre, and learn more about Microsoft Teams for healthcare organizations.

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While the pandemic may have encouraged faster adoption of virtual healthcare from consumers and providers alike, as the world attempts to move past the pandemic and return to more normalcy, virtual healthcare will remain an attractive option for easily accessible care. However, virtual health's benefits extend beyond accessibility alone.

Improving the patient experience

A virtual health visit can seem intimidating to a patient their first time around, but Teams makes it an easy and seamless experience for anyone with an internet-connected device.

Whether located five minutes or five hours from their doctor, patients can join their appointment in seconds through a unique, secure link. Teams also sends appointment reminders and can even securely manage digital intake forms, minimizing confusion for patients.

Similar to an in-person visit, the patient waits for their appointment in a virtual waiting room. Once they're admitted, they'll be "face-to-face" with a provider. Following their appointment, Teams offers integrated post-care follow-up tools to keep documents in one convenient, secure place.

The entire experience, from booking the appointment and receiving appointment reminders, to forms leading up to and following the actual visit, happens within the Teams platform. This ensures all communications and documents come from one single source, alleviating patient confusion. When it's time for the appointment, it takes just one click to joinno downloads, no installs, and no software licensing from the patient's perspective, making it easy to use. And when you aren't feeling well, that ease of access and simplicity to join your appointment and get the support and information you need is invaluable.

Enhancing collaboration and security for healthcare providers

From a provider standpoint, Teams' benefits are multifaceted.
During appointments, clinicians can chat "face-to-face," screen share as needed, send patient education videos, and even easily loop in remote specialists through three-way call functionality. This enhances the patient experience while saving time for everyone and enhancing real-time collaboration.

Multidisciplinary teams can collaborate and synchronize activities, ideas, and documents in a single place. Teams' document management and versioning tools streamline processes and minimize time otherwise spent synchronizing various providers' patient record updates and notes. It also enhances medical team collaboration and communication, while making patient follow-up activities and documents a breeze.

Importantly, this is all done with the utmost in security protocols. In addition to Microsoft's state-of-the art general security measures, Teams includes precautions to protect patient health data and other regulated and ethics-sensitive data. For example, background blur helps safeguard protected health information that may display behind physicians during virtual visits. All messages are encrypted to protect patient data. Azure Active Directory manages identities and various user-level permissions, and multi-factor authentication and self-service password resets boost security while also minimizing demands on IT staff.

Virtual health grew 240% throughout the pandemic, and it continues to provide providers and patients lasting opportunities for collaboration, convenience, and enhanced accessibility. Read more about how Teams can help healthcare organizations in the full whitepaper at https://aka.ms/TeamsinHC

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Around the world, many agencies moved to remote work, even for first responders. Agencies put phased squads into the field, while making secondary line officer and support personnel remote. Patrol officers, detectives, and administrators were isolated so they could be utilized if the frontline responders were exposed to the virus. This model led to quick adoption of Microsoft Office 365, and specifically Microsoft Teams.

Rapidly evolving digital tools are changing the ways law enforcement agencies work. When used properly, the tools can help agencies to streamline internal communications and workflows, and to collaborate internally and externally using the highest security and compliance standards. Microsoft Teams has helped law enforcement agencies around the globe achieve this goal.

Streamlining internal communications and workflows

By nature, much of law enforcement is mobile. Microsoft Teams can help departments communicate more quickly and effectively, and to collaborate in a secure digital workspace.

Agencies can gain interdepartmental efficiency as well as cross jurisdictional efficiency and insights. Teams can become the single source for file management, scheduling, conferencing, and even instant messaging for internal and external resources.

For example, patrol supervisors can schedule shifts and communicate changes securely and seamlessly, streamlining processes like scheduling. They can stay better connected with their officers, communicating securely and even "face-to-face" with video on the fly.
An officer in a complex situation could use Teams to discuss the issue via conference call with their supervisor, a detective, and even other agencies that share a Teams account. The ability to use any device in any location provides instant access to information for making decisions in the field. This can limit costly mistakes and ensure positive outcomes.

Law enforcement also has a valuable role in the judicial process; however, scheduling an officer for a court appearance is often done blindly. Teams can link the courts and police agencies, using a shared calendar to reduce the back-and-forth friction of trying to align cases and work shifts. Microsoft Teams can even unite mobile officers with courtrooms. This can increase the speed of justice, as well as reduce court dismissals and overtime costs.

While working their shifts remotely, officers could collaborate real-time with an attorney in court: to give testimony, provide requested documentation, or answer in-session questions without delay. Microsoft Teams also provides transcription and language services to meet all needs for accessibility and understanding.

Finally, the meetings can be recorded and saved for evidentiary and disclosure purposes. Teams makes the entire communications process seamless and secure.

Enhancing external collaboration for better outcomes

Jurisdictions have boundaries, but criminals do not recognize those boundaries. In fact, they actively exploit boundaries to evade detection and capture. To solve crimes quickly, protect constituents, and deliver better outcomes, law enforcement agencies need to collaborate effectively with external agencies and partners.

Microsoft Teams is uniquely positioned to address the complex cross-agency landscape in a very simple way, all while maintaining agency data integrity and privacy.

Microsoft Teams has built-in security protocols:

• Data is labeled and classified so it can be appropriately assigned according to standard protection policies.
• Teams automatically blocks or limits access if a user doesn't have the right permissions or has not verified identity.
• Agencies can further encrypt, limit, or block access to specific pieces of information.

Consider working a cross-jurisdictional case. You have a victim statement and need to check another jurisdiction's surveillance video. By giving the external partner guest access, you can chat and collaborate through built-in apps, while sharing only permissioned data and maintaining complete control over your files. You can even store those shared documents and chat messageswith version controlin case you need them for future information requests.

From helping U.K. police forces collaboratively combat crime, to enhancing Belgium's national police force's communications, Microsoft Teams has proven its ability to enhance global law enforcement. Read more about how Teams can help law enforcement agencies and departments, including real-world examples, in the full whitepaper.

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Driving collaboration on the frontline

In today's climate, it has become critical for law enforcement agencies to be equipped with robust solutions that enhance internal communication and support collaboration with external partners ones able to accommodate tasks such as shift scheduling and data exchange, both internally and with other police forces. Given the highly sensitive nature of data being shared, tools must also adhere to the strictest security and compliance standards. To keep pace with these rapidly evolving requirements, agencies across Canada are relying on Microsoft Teams for an all-in-one platform that delivers on the diverse needs of law enforcement agencies. Through Teams, agencies are realizing a number of benefits including:

• Enhanced connections and centralized communications. Teams offers a single hub to streamline workflows, manage daily meetings and tasks, and swap shifts. Officers in the field can also access, share, organize and update documents remotely as well as join meetings or send real-time updates in chat.
• Cross-agency collaboration. Teams allows officers across different regions to easily share information in real time with the ability to cooperate and track criminals as they move across jurisdictions. By bringing together disparate data into one common hub, Teams turns data into actionable information.
• The ability to securely share and protect sensitive data. Only the right users have the right level of access to information, by automatically blocking or limiting access if a user does not have the right permissions or their identity is not verified.

In addition to Teams, Microsoft is also empowering law enforcement through cloud, data, AI and productivity solutions allowing them to uncover new capabilities, efficiencies and cost savings. For example, digital case and record management tools have replaced or improved labour-intensive, paper-based processes built on old workflows. Digital transcription and audio/video recording services have also become a standard for many agencies, in turn reducing time spent on manual tasks and enabling officers and their support teams to focus on higher value functions. As you can see, digital transformation is no longer a future objective, but a requirement to enable remote work and improve operations for the evolution of law enforcement.

A global ecosystem of partners and thought leaders

When leveraging Microsoft solutions, law enforcement agencies benefit from more than just technology; they gain access to a vast partner ecosystem providing exclusive resources, programs, tools and connections to foster growth and fuel digital transformation. We currently have over 13,000 partners in Canada and many more around the world equipping organizations in all industries, including those in public safety, with the expertise and technology to thrive.

One of our cutting-edge partners is NICE, a worldwide provider of software solutions using Microsoft Azure to help more than 25,000 organizations globally make smarter, insight-driven decisions, deliver better customer service, combat fraud and safeguard citizens. We also have Caselines, a Thomson Reuters evidence management solution, that provides a secure and integrated platform to help police, prosecutors, lawyers and judges work across their respective judicial functions with confidence and trust. Another leading partner is VeriSaaS, who brings cognitive-enabled and mobile-ready solutions to improve field intelligence and evidence collection to support mission critical information in the field and for court.

In a time when the public sector is being asked to do more with less, Microsoft remains dedicated to equipping frontline agencies with strong, consistent and secure solutions to help them innovate and better serve their community.

We're more than just a software company
For more information on how Microsoft Teams is fuelling digital transformation in law enforcement, you can download the following e-book.

I also encourage you to register for an on-demand webinar in which Microsoft's Kirk Arthur, Director, Worldwide Public Safety & Justice and John Manning, Associate Architect, Public Safety & National Security Solutions, will discuss the latest policing industry trends and how agencies can embrace technology to drive their digital transformation.

On April 29, join us for a live webinar as John Manning, Microsoft's Associate Architect, Public Safety & National Security Solutions, explores how technology is helping enhance public safety, broker community partnerships, and save lives. Register today to reserve your spot for this live, interactive conversation.

The post Fueling Innovation in Canada’s Frontline Law Enforcement 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.

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