How to Use Microsoft Secure Score to Strengthen Your Cybersecurity
Static cybersecurity strategies are no longer enough in a world where digital threats are constantly evolving. Organizations operating online must regularly update their data loss prevention tactics to match their current risk level. But how do you know which methods to adapt to provide the most vigorous defense?
The Microsoft 365 Secure Score offers a powerful tool to enhance cybersecurity optimization when using the Microsoft ecosystem for workplace communication, collaboration, and data storage. It provides organizations with actionable recommendations to enhance cyber resilience and streamline risk mitigation.
Below, we’ll explore how you can use the Security Score to guide your organization’s security strategy and ensure your IT security tools align with industry standards and best practices.
What is the Microsoft Secure Score?
The Microsoft Security Score is a feature in the portal for Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft’s extended detection and response (XDR) solution. Businesses can strengthen their security on this centralized platform, leveraging its threat detection and response features to prevent harmful breaches across their infrastructure, whether within their endpoints, identities, emails, or applications.
The Security Score can function as your IT security scorecard, giving you a numerical grade on your current level of security. You can use its information to uncover weaknesses and vulnerabilities in everything from your configurations and user behavior to your account activity and device management.
The number also helps you create internal and external benchmarks: you can compare your level of security as it changes with time to see your progress, and you can also see how you measure up compared to similar organizations.
A higher score means that your cybersecurity optimization is more robust and that you’ve already implemented more of Microsoft’s recommended risk mitigation actions.
Key Components of the Microsoft Secure Score
So, how exactly does Microsoft Defender determine your Secure Score? What is the platform’s approach for generating the number on display?
Secure Score assigns points based on whether you’ve configured recommended security features, completed specific tasks, or addressed Microsoft’s recommendations through an alternative strategy—such as a third-party solution. You’ll only receive recommendations relevant to the Microsoft products your organization uses.
Typically, points are awarded when a recommended action is fully implemented. However, in some cases, you may receive partial points if the action is completed for only some devices or users.
Aside from your current score, you can also view your planned score, which reflects the potential improvement after completing specific actions. Your achievable score represents the maximum score you can attain based on your risk acceptance level and the Microsoft licenses your organization holds.
A perfect score is unlikely—and that’s okay. Some recommendations may not align with your organization’s needs or could impact usability for your team. In some cases, accepting a certain level of risk may be necessary to maintain productivity. However, your score can provide you with valuable insights to help you create a security strategy that balances protection and efficiency.
Benefits of Using the Microsoft Secure Score
Leveraging the Microsoft Security Score means that you gain a clearly defined roadmap for making decisions about your cloud security optimization. You’ll no longer need to rely on assumptions or intuition because you can take informed action based on measurable security insights. Your data protection tactics will then be more effective and cost-effective. This streamlined security assessment process will also:
- Reduce the need for manual analysis
- Prevent wasting resources by taking actions that don’t significantly impact your security
- Simplify the process of meeting requirements for compliance standards and regulations. You will have explicit instructions and a structured approach to keeping your data confidential, available, and intact.
- Proactively minimize risk, making your organization less likely to respond to threats reactively during a crisis. You will have already made preemptive changes to thwart many types of risk in their tracks before they can cause any actual damage.
- Streamline permissions management, making it easier to ensure unauthorized users don’t access your confidential, sensitive data, reinforcing stakeholder trust in your team.
Ultimately, this will help keep your organization operating smoothly, with less data and financial loss.
Cybersecurity Strategies to Improve Your Microsoft Secure Score
Think about your Microsoft Secure Score as a snapshot depicting the overall puzzle that makes up your cybersecurity. You will need to address various pieces across different categories to improve your organization’s score. However, you’ll want to prioritize acting on the recommendations that are most feasible for your organization at the current time, based on your resources and limitations, as well as the recommendations that will have a bigger impact.
Start with:
1. Comprehensive identity management
Tackling how you approach identity within your Microsoft 365 environment is a crucial place to start. Enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a simple way to add an extra layer of security and improve your score. Best of all, Microsoft Defender offers partial credit as more users do it! We also recommend reviewing permissions and user roles to ensure team members only receive privileges based on what’s required to accomplish their tasks.
2. Proactive data governance
Improving your Secure Score also involves securing how your organization stores and uses data across Microsoft 365.
- Have you encrypted your sensitive data when necessary?
- Have you labeled and classified your data based on its level of sensitivity and risk?
Creating and enforcing strong data loss prevention policies can help you align your data use with Microsoft’s best practices and ensure that only authorized users can access resources.
3. Thorough endpoint protection
Implementing advanced threat protection (ATP) tools will help you defend against sophisticated threats and boost your score, since most focus on endpoint protection. As a result, you’ll proactively maintain your device’s health and avoid getting recommendations for remediating issues because you’ve already met Microsoft Defender‘s security standards.
4. Solid security framework
Organizations should develop holistic strategies for maintaining and increasing their security score over time. Beyond addressing your security recommendations in Microsoft Defender, it’s critical to build a comprehensive framework that involves regularly assessing your technology and updating your systems, software, and applications.
You should also educate all employees on behaving more securely when interacting with your digital tools and assets. For example, a professional association that received designDATA staff training successfully transitioned to the cloud because their team understood and followed best practices for data loss prevention.
How designDATA Helps Organizations Optimize Their Security Score
Risk assessment tools like the Microsoft Secure Score can offer organizations a valuable method for understanding their current level of security and vulnerability. By regularly monitoring and improving their score, organizations can strengthen their resilience against evolving threats. Keeping data secure ensures business continuity, minimizes disruptions, and enhances overall efficiency.
When your organization partners with designDATA to implement our cybersecurity solutions, we will demystify your Secure Score and guide you through implementing the recommended actions and employing other strong tactics to defend your data.
Let’s connect to discuss how we can support your organization with its cybersecurity optimization.
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