Microsoft Secure Score: Overview

Secure Score has been around for several years, serving as an immensely useful measurement tool when reviewing our client’s security posture. As such, we have decided to focus on using Secure score as the benchmark to make improvements in our clients’ Microsoft product security configuration.

What is Secure Score?

Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization’s security posture, with a higher number indicating more recommended actions taken. Following the Secure Score recommendations can protect your organization from threats. From a centralized dashboard in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, organizations can monitor and work on the security of their Microsoft 365 identities, apps, and devices. Secure Score helps organizations to:

• Report on the current state of the organisation’s security posture.
• Improve their security posture by providing discoverability, visibility, guidance, and control.
• Compare with benchmarks and establish key performance indicators (KPIs).

Microsoft Secure Score makes it easy to improve your posture across a set of controls and solutions such as multi-factor authentication, manage devices, and enforce conditional access to ensure you can keep your distributed workforce safe. When you add these scores to your regular reporting and Security KPIs, you get measurable data. This helps to clearly demonstrate the progress you’re making to better secure your environment. That way, you can ensure that you’re protected from both known and unknown threats, while minimising the potential damage an incident may cause.

How will Alliance Business Technologies use Secure Score?

As Alliance Business Technologies moves all managed clients onto Essentials Security and begins to undertake improvements, the Secure Score will gradually improve, providing an indication of the clients’ progress toward a more mature security posture. Each client’s secure score will update automatically, but in certain cases, when other 3rd party tools are in use, it will require manual intervention. When best practices are followed, we anticipate our clients’ score to initially fall to around 65%, however, with further improvements and hardening, our goal is to have all clients’ Secure Scores to reach over 85%.

Although Secure Score is useful, with Microsoft’s baseline policies and recommendations changing every month, the score may increase or decrease from one month to the next, despite having made no modifications. Therefore, the score is a much better indicator over longer periods of time, rather than month to month.