Microsoft 365 security best practices case study: DynTek

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Finding the right fit with Office 365 security solutions

Office 365 Enterprise E5 provides a range of integrated security solutions like Advanced Threat Protection, Threat Intelligence, Advanced eDiscovery, and Advanced Data Governance. These solutions help Microsoft partners give customers peace of mind.

DynTek, a successful IT consulting firm based in Orange County, California, has a long history working with security technology and developing solutions for a variety of public sector and commercial organizations. Today, their security practice is an extension of their experience. “We typically build our consulting services around products and technologies where we have core competencies and expertise,” explained Steven Sanchez, National Alliance Director and Director of Sales for DynTek.

When it comes to securing customers’ productivity software, DynTek often finds that the solutions within Office 365 provide a better fit than the over-built solutions customers already possess. “Once we start a conversation about what they’re trying to accomplish and how much of their existing solutions they’re actually utilizing, we can usually draw a compelling correlation between what they need and what Office 365 can do for them,” Sanchez said. “In those scenarios, Office 365 wins almost every time because it’s a better fit for customers who own way more than they need.”

Driving upgrades to Office 365 Enterprise E5

The sales case for Office 365 becomes even more persuasive when DynTek helps customers understand how many additional tools they get when they upgrade to Office 365 Enterprise E5. “Once we start talking about security, it’s an easy next step to explain how customers can get all the benefits of solutions like Advanced Threat Protection, Threat Intelligence, and Advanced eDiscovery for an incremental upgrade,” Sanchez explained.

The hidden value of Advanced eDiscovery

One of the key values that customers get with Office 365 Enterprise E5 is Advanced eDiscovery, which makes it easier for organizations to identify relevant documents, reconstruct email threads, and find relationships in unstructured data.

While people see obvious value in eDiscovery for the legal industry, DynTek has found that it’s a valuable tool for a wide variety of organizations. “We see applications for eDiscovery all over the place, whether it’s K-12 education, financial services, insurance, or healthcare,” Sanchez said. “Any organization that has to be litigation-responsive benefits from eDiscovery. It’s especially important in HR environments that have to produce documents in cases related to terminated employees, disability claims, or discrimination cases–and that’s a potential requirement just about everywhere.”

In some situations, DynTek has found that Office 365 Enterprise E5 can sell itself once clients see just how much time and money can be saved when Advanced eDiscovery is used to fulfill document production requests.

Sanchez related DynTek’s experience with a state Attorney General’s office that was so impressed with the speed and accuracy of the eDiscovery responses they received from other state agencies that were using Office 365, they were compelled to look at it for their own needs. “The responses they received from other agencies drove their interest in seeing if they could cull their own data more effectively.” Sanchez said. “What’s interesting is that because they were requiring eDiscovery of others and getting results in such a clean fashion, it drove them in the direction of Office 365.”

“If you have shared documents that you store in SharePoint, if you have individual documents that are shared in OneDrive, if you have emails that are all in one environment, now you can see all the data that’s within your tenant with one simple eDiscovery query,” Sanchez explained.

To illustrate the value of Advanced eDiscovery, Sanchez related the story of a state healthcare agency that needed to respond to a lawsuit. “The Office 365 solution gave them the ability to go in and look at all of the historical information around that case very easily,” he said. “In the past, they would have had to do it using spreadsheets, manually culling all the data.”

Making a case that customers easily relate to

DynTek stresses to customers that the benefits of Office 365 Enterprise E5 are easily within reach. “The game-changing nature of Office 365 is that it is a fully encapsulated solution that we can present to customers versus distributed architecture that may or may not be based on best-of-breed technologies. That’s the conversation we have with customers: It’s a fully integrated solution, and in many cases, it’s something you already own or something that you can get for a small upgrade,” Sanchez said. “The key is to help customers understand that Office 365 security solutions give customers a lot of benefit and let them retire an existing solution where they may be paying for more than they need.”