What is Microsoft Secure Score?
Microsoft Secure Score was previously known as Office 365 Security Score. It is a free security tool for organisations that have Office 365 and Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection. Secure Score helps organisations to gain a deeper understanding and improve their security position against any possible threats.
Secure Score will give you recommendations to improve and protect your business from any security threats. Organisations can use this tool to monitor and improve the security of their Microsoft 365 identities, apps, and devices.
What does Secure Score help with?
Secure Score can be helpful for monitoring and reporting on an organisation’s security posture, such as providing discoverability, visibility, guidance, and control. This helps to identify metrics and trends needed to improve a company’s security score. With Secure Score, you can also compare your score with benchmarks and therefore establish key performance indicators.
Secure Score also can be integrated with other Microsoft products and can also reflect when third-party solutions have completed the recommended actions. Additionally, it allows you to compare your organisation’s score with the scores of similar organisations.
How to use it
Microsoft Secure Score can be found with this Microsoft Secure Score URL. Your secure score will be calculated for you based on the controls you can configure and the controls that you have configured. It will give you a score for both your Office 365 and Windows. These two scores are then added together to create your overall Secure Score. The number that is shown below your overall score represents the score that can be achieved for your organisation depending on the set of features you have.
Secure Score also allows you to compare your score to other organisations of a similar seat size. This feature will also give you a ‘Target Score’, this represents what your score could be if you put the recommended actions into place. You can decide to set this target to either Basic, Balanced or Aggressive, and it will change the actions you need to take in accordance with the target level that you pick.
You can click each action to learn more about them, and you can also choose to ‘ignore’ certain actions. Once you have implemented any recommendations and actions, your score will be updated the following day.
You will be given points for completing certain actions and recommendations including:
- Configuring recommended security features
- Doing security-related tasks
- Addressing the improvement action with a third-party application or software, or an alternate mitigation
How many points do you get for each action?
Each action will be rewarded with 10 points. However, you can also earn a percentage of the points if you implement actions to a certain number of your users instead of all of them. For example, if you implement action to half of your users, you will receive 5 points instead of 10.
What permissions are required?
You will need certain permissions to have access to Secure Score. Different permissions will allow you access to different features. These include Read and Write roles, which enable you to make changes. Additionally, there are read-only roles which means you can’t edit anything within Secure Score.
Read and Write
The roles that are defined as read and write roles include:
- Global administrator
- Security administrator
- Exchange administrator
- SharePoint administrator
Read-only
The roles that are defined as read-only roles include:
- Helpdesk
- User administrator
- Service support administrator
- Security reader
- Security operator
- Global reader
What Products are included?
Secure Score currently gives organisations recommendations about how they can improve their score for many products including:
- Microsoft 365
- Azure Active Directory
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
- Microsoft Defender for Identity
- Defender for Cloud Apps
- Microsoft Teams
Microsoft has also announced that they will be expanding this list soon.
FAQ
What is Microsoft Secure Score?
It is a free security tool for organisations that have Office 365 and Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection.
How can I access it?
Microsoft Secure Score can be found here https://security.microsoft.com/securescore.
How many points is each action worth?
Each action will be rewarded with 10 points. However, you can also earn a percentage of the points if you implement actions to a certain number of your users instead of all of them.
What permissions do I need to be able to access it?
You will need to be granted either Read and Write roles, which enable you to make changes, or read-only roles which means you can’t edit anything within Secure Score.
What products will it give security recommendations for?
- Microsoft 365
- Azure Active Directory
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
- Microsoft Defender for Identity
- Defender for Cloud Apps
- Microsoft Teams
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