July 5, 2021

WORKING TOGETHER TO OPTIMISE MICROSOFT 365’S GLOBAL SECURITY.

Measuring the maturity of your cloud security in one overview. That’s what War Child did with the security QuickScan from Rapid Circle and Microsoft.

Children are stronger than war. That’s what War Child believes. That’s why they work every day to give children what they need to build a peaceful future. Creating safe places where children can recover, providing psychosocial support, and offering education. That’s why War Child makes its programs and knowledge available to all organisations that want to work with them. Currently, 487 War Child employees work in 17 countries.

MICROSOFT 365 AS BACKBONE

To manage all of this properly, your IT infrastructure is vital. Robin Groeneweg, ICT Manager at War Child: “Microsoft 365 is truly the backbone of our office automation. It’s the tool in which we collaborate, communicate, and share knowledge with each other. Since many employees travel, the cloud helps them stay reachable and able to work anytime, anywhere.”

“With the cloud come security issues. Groeneweg: “Security has always been a point of attention for us because we work with sensitive information. But we noticed that the Microsoft platform was changing quickly and becoming increasingly complex. At the same time, we saw external threats increasing. We realised: We can’t do all of this alone. We need external help to see where we stand.” That’s why Robin had a security QuickScan performed by Rapid Circle.

During the QuickScan, we scanned the cloud environment at War Child, looked at policies and processes, and engaged with key stakeholders. Based on this, we mapped out the risks and impact of the current environment at a glance. We also created a roadmap with recommendations in the areas of device, application, information, and identity security.

“The results are a nice justification to see what we are already doing well and with which things we still need to work on,” said Robin. One of the quick wins was setting up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), also known as two-factor authentication.

WE DO IT TOGETHER

External hiring to take care of action points naturally costs money. Money that War Child prefers to spend directly on programs and children. That’s why during the process, a nice collaboration form was chosen. A form in which Rapid Circle acts as an advisor, and in which War Child executes as much as possible itself.

This meant that Bas van den Hoven, security expert at Rapid Circle, had a session every two weeks with War Child’s IT administrators. During these sessions, he helped them implement the recommendations by offering inspiration, giving explanations, and looking along. After each session, the IT administrators were given homework and worked on it themselves.

LOOK BEYOND TECHNOLOGY

“The real added value of Rapid Circle is that they not only think along about the technical setup but also about how something lands within the organisation. And how we can explain it to users. This worked very well, for example, during the implementation of MFA.”

MFA is a way to add an extra layer of security to your environment. It combines something you know (password or PIN code) with something you “have,” like a phone, an authenticator app, or a TOTP key. “Based on Rapid Circle’s experience with other organisations, we received various templates and communication materials. We adapted these ourselves to our organisation. That helped us to get it across internally.”

THE FUTURE

War Child’s ambition in the field of IT is to make as much use as possible of new possibilities in Microsoft 365. Modernising is, therefore, an important theme. This certainly applies to security but also to topics such as identity management, applications, and data. “We are busy setting up the identity piece properly. And we are already well on our way to further modernising our application landscape. The next nice step is to focus on the data side. Think of things like Data Loss Prevention and data classification.”

The collaboration format suits War Child and Rapid Circle very well. Both parties, therefore, want to continue working together in the future and bring the modern workplace at War Child to an even higher level in this way.

Like War Child, measuring the maturity of your cloud security in one overview?

Read more about our Security Maturity Assessment.