Are you looking for the best way to improve your Microsoft Secure Score rating? We’re going to give you our top five strategies for boosting your Secure Score.
By following these tips, you could improve your Microsoft Secure Score by up to 40% in as little as one month.
Going down this road is about more than seeing a number grow. Your Secure Score is a key performance indicator of your overall cybersecurity posture.
Especially with AI accelerating the pace of cybersecurity attacks and the average breach costing approximately $4.44M, the old adage is more relevant now than it’s ever been: An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.
Using the Microsoft Secure Score to Justify Cybersecurity Investment to Senior Leadership
As an IT leader, you know all of this. The great thing about Microsoft’s Secure Score is that it gives you a tangible, concrete way to prove to your C-suite and board that their investment in cybersecurity is paying off.
That’s the thing about investing in cybersecurity measures. Its success is often hard to measure because when it’s working, nothing happens. There’s often pressure to allocate resources to initiatives like agentic AI deployment because there’s a direct link to the bottom line: increased productivity, more revenue, or reduced costs.
Of course, poor cybersecurity practices will have an outsized impact if you get hit by ransomware or fall victim to a data breach. The problem is that, by the time that happens, it’s too late.
That’s why the Microsoft Secure Score is such a valuable tool. It doesn’t just show you whether the measures you’re implementing are working and give you direction for what to improve next.
It gives you a political tool that you can leverage to show progress, justify investment, and provide peace of mind.
A better Secure Score will also help you negotiate a better cyber insurance plan. Just like having a clean driving record earns you a better rate on your car insurance premium, cybersecurity insurers provide preferential rates to organizations with strong cyber controls and the data to back it up. The Microsoft Secure Score is a credible data point that’s easy to reference.
Ready to get started? CloudFirst has deep expertise in Microsoft cybersecurity, and we’re going to give you our top five tips for how to improve your Microsoft Secure Score.
What Is the Microsoft Secure Score?
According to Microsoft, the Secure Score “is a measurement of an organization’s security posture, with a higher number indicating more recommended actions taken.”
Essentially, you score points for configuring recommended security features, doing security-related tasks, and addressing recommendations. The score is updated in real time.
The Secure Score can range from 0 to 100% and follows a simple logic:
- 0–30% is high risk
- 31–60% is moderate risk
- 61–85% is strong cybersecurity
- 86%+ is excellent cybersecurity
Unfortunately, the average score sits around 30–45%. Yikes.
This isn’t a vanity metric. If your Microsoft Secure Score is too low, then you’re vulnerable. Especially since hackers are known to go after the softest targets, having a poor Secure Score is like pouring blood into shark-infested waters.
If you put up enough barriers, trying to break in may not be worth a cybercriminal’s time. Lock down your systems and network before the worst-case scenario comes to pass.
Top 5 Ways to Increase Your Microsoft Secure Score
Some cybersecurity fixes require deep expertise and long implementation timelines. Others are simple and straightforward.
At CloudFirst, we recommend starting with the low-hanging fruit—particularly if you’re in that “average” camp with a Secure Score in the 30–45% range. This will give you the fastest gains, and then you can take the numbers to the board, show them your efforts are working, and push them to make cybersecurity a higher priority.
These are our top five tips for increasing your Microsoft Secure Score.
Improve Identity and Access Management
Strengthening your identity and access management (IAM) is probably the highest-impact change you can make.
Because phishing and social engineering are common attack vectors, strong IAM can be the difference between an attacker escalating privileges to admin access and getting locked out entirely.
Start by enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) everywhere. This is one of the easiest ways to block unauthorized access, and it’s relatively simple to roll out across your organization, devices, and applications.
Second, establish a zero-trust architecture and enforce conditional access policies. This involves blocking legacy authentication protocols like IMAP, POP, and SMTP that don’t support MFA.
Third, reduce admin privileges and implement role-based access controls (RBAC) to reduce insider risk. At this stage, you may also look into configuring Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for just-in-time access.
Bolster Email Security
Email is an extremely common attack vector. Whether that takes the form of phony emails pretending to be a bank or sophisticated spoofing designed to masquerade as the CEO, all it takes to compromise your network is one employee clicking the wrong link.
The fastest way to score a win on the email security front is to block external auto-forwarding. This will immediately improve your Secure Score, because external auto-forwarding is a common method for data exfiltration after account compromise.
The second step you should take is applying data loss prevention (DLP) policies. This helps align your data use with Microsoft’s best practices and ensures that only authorized users get to access resources.
Harden Devices and Endpoints
While endpoint security is an entire topic unto itself—in fact, we’ve written a dedicated guide on how to go about it—there are a couple points to go over that will give your Microsoft Secure Score a quick boost.
First, enforce a policy about what devices connect to your network and how they connect. Make sure that only secure, updated, and hardened devices can connect, and perform regular compliance checks.
This can be particularly problematic in bring your own device (BYOD) environments. In that case, consider app protection policies or require app-based conditional access.
Second, for devices running Windows, whether that’s a PC or a server, don’t forget to deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. This software, likely bundled into a subscription package you’re already paying for, is designed to prevent, detect, and respond to threats at the device level.
Since it natively integrates into Microsoft IT environments, it’s no surprise that proper configuration and deployment of this tool factors into your Secure Score.
Manage Data and Collaboration
How data is stored, tagged, managed, and backed up is a key pillar of any cybersecurity plan. This is another topic where the full story can fill several textbooks, but we have two quick ways to improve it.
Start by tightening external sharing. That means tightening guest access to applications like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Misconfigured apps can lead to unintentional data exposure.
Second, implement stronger controls for sensitive data. Require users to classify and label it as such, and then implement systems on the back end to make sure it’s encrypted both at rest and in transit.
Establish Process and Governance
This is the most broad-ranging category and will even have implications for how you go about improving your Microsoft Secure Score. A strong and well-articulated cybersecurity process will help you channel your efforts and know where to look for the biggest wins in the shortest amount of time.
A good starting point is to enable Security defaults in Microsoft Entra ID. This is preconfigured and ready to go. And according to Microsoft, it can stop more than 99.9% of common, identity-related attacks. This makes it a great baseline that requires next to no effort to implement.
From there, go into the Microsoft 365 Defender portal to view your Secure Score recommendations, categorized by impact and implementation difficulty. Everyone’s situation is different, so this is going to give you a more detailed and personalized view than we can provide in a general blog post.
When you work with CloudFirst, we look at the whole picture and craft a custom-tailored plan to quickly and effectively raise your Microsoft Secure Score and overall cybersecurity posture.
Finally, you also need to think hard about where to accept risk when appropriate. Not every measure fits every organization. The Secure Score interface lets you make certain controls as “risk accepted,” so you have clear visibility into these decisions.
What Products Factor Into the Microsoft Secure Score?
The Microsoft Secure Score takes into account a huge swath of your IT infrastructure. Of course it includes the products you would expect, but it also natively integrates with common third-party enterprise tools.
Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Entra ID are clearly important factors that influence your Secure Score. One thing we see again and again is that organizations are paying for these tools but aren’t using them. Heck, some organizations might not even know they have them.
If you’ve bought a subscription bundle from Microsoft such as Business Premium, E3, or E5, then you almost certainly have access to these security products.
“The amount of products from Microsoft can be confusing,” says Brian Dolan, Senior Microsoft Licensing Specialist at CloudFirst. “We can help you sort it out, cut out redundant third-party vendors, and make Microsoft cybersecurity both cheaper and easier to justify to the CFO.”
Microsoft's documentation indicates that the following products are currently included in Secure Score:
- App governance
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Citrix ShareFile
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
- Microsoft Defender for Identity
- Microsoft Defender for Office
- Docusign
- Exchange Online
- GitHub
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
- Microsoft Purview Information Protection
- Microsoft Teams
- Okta
- Salesforce
- ServiceNow
- SharePoint Online
- Zoom
The great thing about Microsoft Secure Score and the cybersecurity ecosystem it represents is that these are all comprehensive, consolidated, and natively integrated tools.
Compared to third-party software solutions that may or may not work out of the box and often require additional engineering effort (not to mention expense), going this route is generally the best option for companies that make use of the products listed above.
CloudFirst Is Your Trusted Microsoft Cybersecurity Partner
We get it. Managing cybersecurity and everything that goes into it can be a lot, especially when you’ve already got a backlog to work through.
The Microsoft cybersecurity experts at CloudFirst are here to help.
Our team has deep knowledge and experience securing Microsoft IT environments, from the largest enterprises all the way to small, locally owned businesses.
“Just by onboarding, our clients usually get a 30–40% bump to their Secure Score after deployment,” explains Hodge Kaufmann, Senior Microsoft Security Engineer at CloudFirst. “Our expertise is setting up your security stack and then making sure you stay safe over the long run.”
CloudFirst takes the complexity out of managing your own security stack and Microsoft product licensing.
On top of that, we provide a custom Power BI dashboard that you, your team, and your board can use to monitor your security and see the progress we’re making together. Microsoft doesn’t have robust built-in reporting; instead it gives you APIs and tells you to figure it out. We’ve done that work for you.
Beyond the Microsoft systems themselves, CloudFirst also has a 24/7 Security Operations Center on standby to respond to incidents in real time, as well as deep expertise integrating and securing Microsoft IT with IBM i and AIX.
Ready to improve your Microsoft Secure Score and gain the confidence of knowing your systems and data are secure?