Microsoft and Vodafone announce partnership to offer Italian companies Microsoft 365 Business, the Modern Workplace solution designed for small and medium-sized enterprises, which integrates Office 365 and Windows 10 technologies with advanced device management solutions in complete security, to ensure maximum protection of company data and support compliance with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
A collaboration that is consistent with Vodafone's strategy of helping SMEs on their path to digitisation and compliance with the new regulation, combining the reliability and quality of the Vodafone network with Microsoft's managed security solutions to offer customers maximum protection in traffic and data management.
Vodafone is the first operator to make the Microsoft 365 solution available in its marketplace, the aim of which is precisely to meet the needs of the new way of working of employees in small and medium-sized enterprises, increasingly based on collaboration, mobility in complete security with advanced tools and devices, increasing productivity and creativity not only individually, but also collectively, anywhere and anytime (https://cloud-apps.vodafone.it/home).
The data of the latest Clusit (Italian Association for Information Security) report speak for themselves: cyber attacks have grown on a global scale by 240% compared to 2011 and increasingly affect crucial sectors, such as politics, finance and private citizens, who were victims of cybercrime on a very large scale in 2017. In Italy, the damage caused by cybercrime is around EUR 10 billion, every five minutes an Italian is a victim of cybercrime, and SMEs are often completely unaware of the risks they run.
Hence the need to help companies in our country to guarantee the security of their customers' data, especially at a time when, in view of the European implementation of the GDPR, it is estimated that only one in ten companies in Italy will be compliant with the new regulation by the date of its application, that around 50% of companies have taken steps to adapt to the new regulation, and that 87% of companies plan to increase the budget allocated to IT security over the next three years. (Source: Information and Privacy Observatory School Management Politecnico di Milano, 6 February 2018).
