As a vendor for Microsoft 365, we spend a lot of time looking at the security of the system.
The Microsoft 365 secure score is one of the most reliable sources that we have to help protect our clients against any security threats.
You may not have heard of it, but it is a great way to identify how securely your Microsoft 365 is set up. It gives you a simple metric that you can use to measure yourself against other businesses of a similar size and see how you compare. It gives you an idea of what other businesses are doing out there in order to remain secure so that you can identify what you can do to improve your own company’s security.
Your Secure Score
To find your company’s Microsoft secure score, go to security.microsoft.com, and sign in with any global admin account. You’ll then see what your current score is.
Don’t panic if it looks very low. It’s not a difficult thing to get fixed if you know what you’re looking for.
Typically, if you were just to set-up Microsoft 365 out of the box, get your email running, and start using programs like Sharepoint right away, your secure score would almost certainly be under 10%. That’s perfectly normal to begin with. And knowing how to increase the score is very easy.
Security Improvements
The most useful part of the security centre is the improvement actions tab. It actually shows you exactly what needs to be improved and each item is ticked off as you improve it.
Some of the steps are fairly simple, some of the steps are a little more complicated, and others require additional monthly licensing in order for them to be activated or to work. But if you make a start to this, your percentage score can increase dramatically with a few simple changes.
We recommend putting a plan in place to prioritise the issues and work through them one by one.
Once you’ve started to implement your plan to remediate some of the issues that you can see within the Microsoft security centre, the best part is that it actually gives you a comparison metric so you can actually see where you were to where you are. It’s always more motivating if you can see your progress. You’ll also start to feel more comfortable as you see your score get better.
Stay Alert
However, don’t just sit back and relax once you get to a reasonable score.
Organisations are forever moving and changing, and the word outside is also changing constantly, with new threats appearing all the time. Your secure score needs to be maintained, it needs to be looked at on a regular basis to make sure there is nothing vital that needs to be remedied.
As a guide, our engineers are looking at these secure scores for our clients on a twice monthly basis just to make sure everything’s ok.
On top of that there is alerting and reporting: if anything serious happens like a risky sign-in or another worrying occurrence, the system can be programmed to alert our engineers straight away.
This is just part of the security operations centre that we offer to Alto clients. Speak to us if you’d like more information.
