Security is a top-of-mind concern in every organization today. Recently, Microsoft released a free security analytics tool to help improve security posture– Office 365 Secure Score.
According to Microsoft, "Office 365 Secure Score is a security analytics tool that gives you better visibility into your Office 365 security configuration and the security features available to you."
Using Secure Score helps increase your organization’s security by encouraging you to use the built-in security features and configurations in Office 365, many of which you already purchased but might not be aware of.
How it works
Secure Score figures out what Office 365 services you’re using (like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange) then looks at your settings and activities and compares them to a baseline established by Microsoft. You’ll get a score based on how aligned you are with best security practices.
Taking action
As useful as the overall score is, the real power of Office 365 Secure Score is the recommended actions you can take to improve your security position. These actions are:
- personalized to your tenant
- prioritized based on the effectiveness of the action
- prioritized based on the level of impact to end users
Each action comes with a detailed explanation of why you should apply them, and contain information such as users’ impact, and implementation costs.
Some recommendations will be easier to implement than others, for example enabling multi-factor authentication for your administrators verses all users.
Compare your score
The average seat size score shows you a score based on other organizations that have a similar number of Office 365 active seats. There are seven seat size groups, 0-5, 6-99, 100-249, 250-999, 1,000-4,999, 5,000-19,999, and 20,000+.
Coming soon Microsoft will be introducing an industry average score, which will show you how your score compares to other organizations that have designated the same industry.
Anyone who has admin permissions (global admin or a custom admin role) for an Office 365 Business Premium or Enterprise subscription can access the Secure Score at https://securescore.office.com.
Get more information on Secure Score from this blog post from Microsoft.
Office 365 Security Best Practices
With Office 365, there are numerous security configurations and tools, many at no cost, that are designed to prevent malicious activity.
