Edgile – the nation’s premier security, compliance and identity consulting firm—and Microsoft have enjoyed a powerful partnership for years. The firm holds nine gold-level partner certifications and was named the 2020 Microsoft Security System Integrator of the year. Edgile works with more than 90 companies in the Fortune 500, including 27 of the Fortune 100.

In 2021, Microsoft declared it will invest over $1 billion every year to improve security as a foundation for its customers. For decades, Microsoft has operated to grow and nurture its  partner ecosystem and the company’s future growth relies on strong security partners like Edgile.

Enterprises today need security and must ensure compliance in a constantly shifting regulatory environment. Edgile’s Automated Regulatory Compliance (ArC) service automates the process.  Forward thinking organizations are defining Zero Trust for their enterprises and Edgile is providing the strategy to put it in place. And when enterprises take action to improve their security posture, they often start with identity. For many years, Edgile has been a leader in designing and implementing modern identity solutions.

Cybersecurity must be tailored to the enterprise’s environment, including verticals, legacy apps, cloud programs, likely attackers and other unique elements. Edgile offers a three-layer approach that focuses on the present and near-future across: the enterprise’s situation (which is always changing); the Microsoft packages (which are also always changing); and the compliance universe.

In layer one, Edgile develops an understanding of the enterprise’s full environment, including current verticals, and identifies where the enterprise expects to be six and 12 months out. What acquisition or division sales are likely? Will that create new verticals or a need to leave a vertical?

In layer two, Edgile leverages their deep knowledge of Microsoft’s current and future plans and applies that to the enterprise’s situation.

For the third layer, Edgile’s team of compliance experts build a compliance requirements framework (including local, state, federal, international and industry requirements) and project what those obligations will look like in six months.

Edgile sets the strategy based on the business needs. Then chooses which Microsoft solutions will be most effective, recommends specific configurations, and then fine-tunes everything to the enterprise’s security, compliance and identity environment. Given budgetary and logistical limitations, the Edgile plan might leverage more of the enterprise’s existing product suite to deliver strong protection as quickly and efficiently as possible, before looking to add more advanced security later in the project. It’s all highly customized.

“Far more than any other company, Microsoft understands where the threats are coming from,” notes Bob Moore, Edgile Managing Director. “That’s because their massive cloud hosting operations see the attacks trying to hit their global cloud tenants, and they track literally billions of signals. Edgile is making it practical and real for clients, taking what Microsoft builds and tweaking it to precisely complement the enterprise’s environment. There is a tremendous complexity in how we deploy within a client organization. Clients are dealing with real-world problems within their organizations and we bring current thinking to the solutions.”

Another big part of the Edgile mission is to help enterprises move to Zero Trust environments, leveraging many of Microsoft’s industry-leading cybersecurity offerings. Zero Trust acknowledges that perimeter-based security models no longer work today and haven’t been advisable for years. With Zero Trust, every system interaction must be verified explicitly (biometrics, robust MFA, behavioral analytics, continuous authentication,and more), least privilege must be strictly enforced, and CISOs and CIOs must assume that they have been breached. Protecting all data and having complete visibility across the digital estate—including on-prem, cloud, remote sites and even shadow IT—is essential.

Edgile is celebrating its 20th year in business and its partnership with Microsoft is a key element of its success to tailor solutions to customers’ environments.