Microsoft and the Metaverse

Learn about the security threats facing the metaverse and how Microsoft Azure can help protect your business

The idea of the metaverse is nothing new. As a concept, it’s been around for decades. The name comes from science fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash, but the concept itself goes back even further, with movies like Tron being classic examples of alternate digital worlds that people can exist in.

In mid-2021, the metaverse suddenly became one of the talked about technologies (next to crypto and NFTs) when Facebook changed their corporate name to Meta and unveiled their Metaverse, a virtual and augmented reality platform, based around their platform. It wasn’t long before companies like Microsoft were talking about their metaverse platforms.

Of course, with technology comes security concerns. Based on data from Microsoft, 91.5% of security experts say that they are concerned about the potential security risks of the metaverse. Another 98.1% of security experts are concerned with the security & privacy risks that come with combining the metaverse and technologies such as deep fakes and AI-generated images & voices.

The good news is that Microsoft has been anticipating the widespread adoption of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality environments and has solutions in place to help protect individual users and companies from potential security threats.

The future of cybersecurity and what Microsoft is doing to keep you safe

As a whole, the last couple of years have been intense from a cybersecurity perspective. The massive shift to remote and blended working environments caused by the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a huge uptick in cybercrime. That on its own has been enough to keep cybersecurity experts busy.

The metaverse introduces an entirely new vector for attacks that up until now hadn’t been considered. Microsoft found that 94.4% of security experts say that introducing VR and AR into workspaces and homes will increase security risks. These risks include everything from identity theft to ransomware and are all the more serious because the metaverse exists in the cloud, which can be challenging to protect.

Let’s explore some of the ways that Microsoft Azure can help keep you, your business, and your employees safe from attacks.

Securing workloads in the cloud and hybrid cloud environments

As mentioned above, with the metaverse, there is a strong need to make sure that you’re working in secure cloud and hybrid cloud environments. With more and more people working remotely, cloud use is on the rise. In 2020, Forbes was predicting that 32% of IT budgets would be dedicated to cloud computing. And, in their 2021 State of the Cloud report, Flexera states that 92% of organizations have a multi-cloud setup, and 80% have a hybrid cloud solution.

What this means is that a lot of organizations have data in the cloud that is potentially vulnerable to cybercrime like ransomware. Microsoft Azure can help protect against the multitude of threats that the cloud faces. Azure Backup, for example, provides a simple backup solution that keeps you safe from ransomware attacks. Rather than being hobbled because a criminal locked you out of your system, you can quickly and effectively restore from backup.

You can take this one step further with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, which helps you assess your current security posture, detect vulnerabilities, and protect critical workloads in both multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Stronger identity management

Identity management is going to be increasingly important as we move deeper into the metaverse. As it stands right now, ensuring that only authorized users access your networks is a monumental task on its own that can come crashing down if someone clicks on the wrong link. That’s why implementing protections like role-based access control can be critical in making sure that even if an attacker does get through, the damage they do is limited by the access they have.

In the metaverse, where people are logging in from all over the world, this becomes an even bigger challenge. Azure Active Directory can help by providing a universal identity platform that can help protect you from up to 99% of cyberattacks. Active Directory helps by providing you with a platform that lets you manage both internal and external users with features like single sign-on, HR provisioning to manage new hires or employees who leave the company, and conditional access restrictions that help manage details like where employees can sign in from or the types of devices they use.

Enhanced connectivity with DDoS protection

The metaverse is only effective if it stays online. That’s why it’s important to ensure that you have protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that can handle what modern cybercriminals are capable of.

DDoS attacks are a coordinated attempt to knock a service, business, whatever offline by flooding the resource with connection requests. The volume of requests is often too much. The service then becomes overwhelmed and shuts down.

As you can see, not only are DDoS attacks increasing in frequency, but they’re getting more intense, as well. Mitigating these attacks is getting harder because of this.

To manage the impact of DDoS, you need a solution that is designed to handle the modern DDoS attack. Azure DDoS Protection provides a turnkey solution that can not only withstand the intensity of a DDoS attack but reduce the cost that can come with mitigation.

Azure provides near real-time reporting, so you learn about an attack as soon as possible. And, the adaptive tuning functionality analyzes traffic patterns and automatically adjusts your protection to match your business.

Looking to get better coverage in the metaverse?

Staying on top of current threats can be a big enough challenge for an organization. Once you throw emerging technologies like the metaverse adds an extra layer of difficulty because everything is so new and changes constantly.

That’s where we come in. Homefield IT is at the forefront of the tech industry and we’re constantly learning not only about new areas of technology, like the metaverse, but also ways that we can help our customers safely explore this space.

Our experts can help you with every aspect of protecting your business in the metaverse using Microsoft Azure. We work closely with you and your team to learn your business needs and help ensure that your security tools are properly configured to protect your business against all possible threats.

If you’d like to learn more, contact us today.