According to PwC, cybercrime tops the list of the most pressing threats to businesses. Security has become increasingly important for any organisation looking to ensure the longevity and health of their company.
After all, the advancement of technology means that there are more ways than ever to breach the security of an institution, which is a problem for all businesses. Due to the importance of this, Microsoft has a robust system dedicated to rating your organisation’s security posture — known as Secure Score.
In this article, we’re going to go over Microsoft Secure Score and Azure Secure Score. We’ll also take a look at how organisations use Secure Score to their advantage.
What is Microsoft Secure Score?
Microsoft Secure Score is Microsoft’s method of measuring your organisation’s security posture. Essentially, the higher your Secure Score is, the better your company’s security is.
Secure Score will then give you tasks that you can undertake to improve your organisation’s security posture, to ensure that you have the maximum security and coverage.
This is a great tool to ensure that your organisation is doing enough to keep secure in the modern technological environment. The insights given by Secure Score are genuinely helpful in ensuring that your organisation remains safe from bad-faith actors and malicious attacks.
Secure Score also has an easy-to-understand interface which is great for any organisation, as it gives you the steps that you need to take immediately to ensure that your company is secure.
Furthermore, you even get access to the visualisation of trends and metrics, integration with the whole suite of Microsoft products, and information about and comparisons to similar organisations to ensure that you’re doing the most that you can for your company.
How does Secure Score work?
Secure Score measures your performance in three key areas:
- Setting up recommended security features
- Undertaking security-related tasks
- Addressing recommended actions
By performing well throughout all of your registered Microsoft applications, you can ensure to raise your institution’s Secure Score with ease.
Your score will be updated in real-time to reflect the latest information for the visualisations and recommended action pages. Secure Score can also sync daily to receive system data about the points achieved throughout the actions that you’ve taken.
What Products are Included in Secure Score?
The following products are included in Secure Score with recommendations are:
- Microsoft 365 (including Exchange Online)
- Azure Active Directory
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
- Microsoft Defender for Identity
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
- Microsoft Teams
More products are being added as time goes on.
What is Azure Secure Score?
Azure Secure Score is fairly similar to Microsoft Secure Score, as it provides the same kind of score for your organisation.
However, the major key difference between the two is that Azure Secure Score is available within the Microsoft Defender for Cloud dashboard — and is more geared towards security within your Azure, Azure Active Directory, and other Azure-based infrastructure, specifically concerning identity management.
Azure Secure Score uses Azure AD to ensure that the identity management and security within your organisation is of a high standard and utilises security features within AD as recommendations and insights to improve your identity security posture.
This is just as important as your Microsoft Secure Score, as identity management is key to ensuring security is of a high standard within any organisation. This is why learning to take advantage of both Secure Scores is best for any organisation looking to maximise their organisation’s security posture.
How Organisations Use Secure Score
Assess Your Current Security Posture
Secure Score will help organisations easily assess and identify flaws and risk factors in their current security posture. With this, they can take more informed steps and make more informed decisions on how to improve security within their organisation.
If you’re looking to get started with your Secure Score, reach out to us. We’re here to help you along the way and can get you started with your Secure Score recommendations.
Track Your Score History and Set Goals
Checking your score once is great, but monitoring and tracking your Secure Score and setting goals to achieve throughout your organisation is a great way to raise the standards of security.
Your Secure Score zone will give you access to visualisation tools and other ways to see your progress and track your history, and allow you to set goals going forward.
Take Actions To Improve Your Score
Knowing your Secure Score is one thing, but taking action to raise it is incredibly important for any organisation.
Secure Score will give you insights and specific recommended actions tailored to your organisation’s needs to ensure that your organisation is truly secure. These are available within the respective Microsoft and Azure Secure Score dashboards and are a great help to making sure that you can improve your Secure Score going forward.
Planning Your Next Steps
You can set specific statuses and record specific notes for any recommended action within your Secure Score zone:
- To Address: You recognise that the recommendations are necessary and aim to address them in the future.
- Planned: There are plans to complete the recommended actions.
- Risk Accepted: There are no plans to complete the recommended actions as they are not suitable for the needs of your organisation.
- Resolved Externally: You’ve already addressed the recommendations with an external party or an internal tool. This will give you points to better reflect your organisation’s true security score.
How We Can Help
Your organisation’s Secure Score is vital to ensure that you take the correct actions in making sure that your organisation is protected from external threats and risks. The powerful Microsoft and Azure Security Score dashboards are filled with information to help you make informed decisions about the future of your organisation’s security.
Are you looking to improve your security posture with Secure Score? Our expert team at HAYNE.cloud will help you and ensure a high standard of security throughout your organisation.
Get in touch with us now or book a meeting to talk to us directly.
