Image source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/us-partner-blog/2017/02/21/office-365-partners-office-365-secure-score/

Security issues are becoming an ever growing concern across the digital landscape. As such, numerous security solutions have been developed as a means of counteracting these threats. Unfortunately, however, leveraging these solutions and configuring their controls, coupled with a lack of knowledge around these controls, many security teams are having difficulty balancing security and productivity, while remaining on top of developing trends.

With Microsoft Secure Score, however, companies can have far better control and visibility over their security posture. The platform offers integration with other Microsoft products, Microsoft 365 identities, data, apps, devices, and infrastructure. It also provides a comparison score to other companies and score tracking, taking into account when third-party solutions tackle recommended solutions.

Microsoft Secure Score gives you points every time you configure recommended security settings and features, take important actions, and perform security-related tasks, even when implementing them with third-party software.

How To Improve Your Security Score

Security recommendations to help streamline the process are organized into groups as follows:

• Identity - Referring to the protection state of your Azure AD accounts and roles.
• Data - Your O365 docs.
• Device - Your devices and Microsoft Defender improvement actions.
• App - Your email and cloud apps.
• Infrastructure - Your Azure resources.

Your current score and available points will be divided among these groups. On the overview page, you'll also get a historical trend and benchmark comparisons of your security score, helping you to make better decisions down the line.

Whenever you decide to take action on any of these groups, you will be presented with four options:

• View Settings - This option allows you to go to the configuration screen to make a change. Every action taken will gain you points, which will be updated within about 24 hours.
• Resolve through Third-Party - This will allow you to mark an action if it has been resolved by a third-party application, awarding you the points accordingly.
• Ignore - This option implies that you have decided to accept the risk of inaction and the total number of secure points you can achieve will be reduced. This action can be undone at any time.
• Review - Some improvement actions, such as mailbox forwarding rules, for example, need to be reviewed regularly to gain and retain points. In this example, the reason for the regular review is to ensure that data is not being ex-filtrated from your network.

Extra Information About Microsoft Secure Score

It's important to note that some improvement actions will be scored in a binary fashion, meaning that you'll get all of the points once the operation is performed. Other actions, however, you will only get a percentage of the points of the overall configuration. So, if the action of protecting all of your users with multi-factor authentication, for instance, is worth 30 points, but you only protect half of your employees, you will only get 15 points.

You can also view your company's score over time in the history tab, which includes a global and industry average, as well as all the actions taken within any given time frame. Lastly, you should keep in mind that the Microsoft Secure Score is not an absolute measurement of your digital safety since no online service is immune from security breaches. It is more of a summary of your security posture based on the measures you've implemented in your Microsoft environment. This tool will help you have a better chance of not being breached.