Adelaide - SMBiT Professionals October Meeting

Are you confident your customers’ Microsoft 365 environments are truly protected—or are you overlooking one of the biggest vulnerabilities?

Karl Thomson

Backing up data is critical, but in today’s threat landscape it’s simply not enough. In this session, we’ll dive into why Entra ID is a cornerstone of Microsoft 365 security—and how failing to protect it exposes businesses to major operational and financial risk.

We’ll break down Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model in practical, easy‑to‑apply terms, and explore a real-world case of a New Zealand organisation whose Microsoft tenant was compromised. You’ll see how the attack unfolded, what could—and couldn’t—be recovered, and the downstream costs and disruption that followed.

We’ll also look beyond cyberattacks to another growing risk: service outages and cloud unavailability. Events like the recent Cloudflare DNS outage highlight why relying on a single vendor for both production and backup can leave you vulnerable. Should you really store your backups with the same provider you're trying to protect yourself from?

While we’ll introduce Arcserve’s built‑in capabilities designed to address these gaps, this session is first and foremost about empowering you. You’ll also get to experience a live demo showcasing exactly how these risks play out and how the right protection strategy can mitigate them. You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of the threats, the right questions to ask, and the insights needed to assess whether your customers can truly tolerate downtime—or if it’s time to rethink what “protection” really means.