Cyber-attacks on organisations like Macquarie are becoming more and more frequent, and hardly a week goes by without us hearing the words ‘phishing’, ‘malware’ ‘DoS’ or ‘I’ve been hacked’. The need to strengthen our current levels of IT security has never been more important.
Program SHIELDS is a body of work that sits within the Operating Plan’s Digital Transformation area of focus and has been established to uplift and remediate our levels of IT security to better protect our staff and student information, as well as the functional systems that we need to run a successful University.
The first stage of the Program SHIELDS activity will focus on us accessing and using our range of Microsoft O365 applications in a much more secure way.
Staff will simply be asked to use a multi-factor authentication (MFA) process to access their MQ email and rest of Microsoft O365 application suite. Many staff will already be familiar with MFA as it’s currently in use for several university applications at the moment.
This new MFA security measure requires an occasional additional step for staff to gain access to their Office 365, which will typically be via a confirmation through a smartphone app.
You do not need to do anything just yet!
Unless you’re a new starter or member of the IT team, you don’t need to take any action just yet. MFA will be rolled out to all staff in a staged approach over the coming months, so when it’s your turn to enrol and register for MFA you’ll receive a notification by email containing everything you need to know. So, sit tight until then.
Early adopters welcome
We already have over 400 users who have now activated MFA for their Office 365 as part of the initial pilot so if you’re an early adopter, want to get ahead of the curve or just love making your data more secure, you can follow the online guide.
The Program SHIELDS team look forward to working with you in the coming months on this important project. If you have any questions please contact the IT Service Desk on 02 9850 4357 or you can email them at onehelp@mq.edu.au.
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when will we have a true single sign-on to all the systems? It is cumbersome signing into email, zoom, mqcms, etc again and again. And now with this new authentication, it’s just adding another layer!
We should be able to log in once, and then be able to access all the applications directly.
Will there be any alternative authentication to using a smartphone app for accessing email, etc?