How Does Basic Authentication End of Life Effect Your Workflow?

Say Goodbye to Basic Authentication

In 2021, Microsoft originally announced the sunsetting of Basic Authentication for Office 365 & Exchange. The original announcement can be found here. The final disabling of this system is set for October 1st, 2022. Any applications that use this authentication with be affected and could break your business workflows.

Why is this happening?

Business Email Compromises (BEC) have a huge financial impact on organizations, in 2021 alone claimed an adjusted loss of nearly $2.4 billion for victims of this cybersecurity hack. These types of compromises show no sign of slowing down, Microsoft reports 921 password attacks every second. Many technology companies are implementing stricter security standards across their systems in an effort to reduce the cybersecurity risk to their customers.

How does this impact my business workflow?

Many applications and services use Office 365 & Exchange to share information and resources. Below are a few examples of what systems may be effective:

Print Asset Notifications

Any printing device or management system that uses Microsoft business email to send notifications, such as status reports, low supply notifications, or usage reports could be affected.

Scan to Email Functionality

Most multifunction printers can scan documents and send the scanned data to a business email. If your printing device uses SMTP to connect to your company’s Microsoft mail server, it is likely this feature will no longer work after October 1st.

Email to Print Functionality

Much like scan to email, auto printing by emailing a specific mailbox can use basic authentication to transmit the data to your print queue. Printers are not the only devices affected by this, if your company uses a print management system to track your document workflow, check to see how this feature is set up there.

Mobile Devices that Use Exchange ActiveSync

As work environments continue to move towards remote or hybrid environments, staff are using their mobile devices to check email, schedule meetings & create tasks. Exchange ActiveSync is a Microsoft protocol smartphones and mobile devices use to connect to business email. This protocol can use basic authentication and will need to be reconfigured to avoid service interruption.

What should I do about this?

If you or your IT department have administrative access to Microsoft 365 you can check if basic authentication protocols are enabled by:

• Login to Microsoft 365 admin center

• Click Settings –> Org Settings

• Select Modern authentication present under the Services tab

If you see any items checked in the Allow access to basic authentication protocols you will need to disable them as well as address any systems that use this type of connection. Microsoft has provided support documentation to help get your systems migrated to modern authentication.