New Security Analytics Service from Microsoft: Office 365 Secure Score

Improve the security of your data in the cloud with Office 365 Secure Score

Microsoft has recently offered limited availability of their security analytics service dubbed Office 365 Secure Score. This tool will help Office 365 Admins understand what they’re currently doing to mitigate risks, as well as what can be done to further protect against potential data security issues.

Microsoft was clever in their naming of this new tool, as they’re comparing it to the familiar credit score that tells consumers how much of a risk they are to banks and other lending institutions. Your Office 365 Secure Score is essentially a credit score for your organization’s security.

How your Office 365 Secure Score is tallied

To come up with the Secure Score model, Microsoft took an inventory of all the possible security measures that could be taken to protect data in Office 365, and came up with a total of 77 different factors. A higher Secure Score indicates that you’re doing a better job of protecting your data, whereas a lower score indicates that your company still has work to do.

The Office 365 Secure Score Summary

By navigating to your Secure Score you’ll instantly get a quick summary of your current score, as well as the total number of points that may be available to you based on a number of things, including your subscription level and the date that your score was last measured.

Risk assessment feature

Within the Office 365 Secure Score you also have a Risk Assessment feature that will outline the top threats based on your behaviors and configuration. Each risk type will allow you to get more information to better explain areas where you may need to tighten up security.

Score Analyzer

With Microsoft’s Score Analyzer, you can track your Secure Score over time and export it to either a PDF or CSV to share with management or other personnel within your company.

Compare your score to other Office 365 customers

To better understand how your Office 365 Secure Score stacks up, Microsoft allows you to see it in relation to the average of all the other Office 365 customers. This gives you a benchmark to determine how your security compares to other organizations.

How to improve your Secure Score

The Secure Store also provides a section where you can take action to help improve your score. This section has a slider where you can preview an improved score. As you move the slider, you’ll see security actions that are added to your queue to implement.

Stay tuned for more updates related to the Office 365 Secure Score

The Secure Score is currently in beta, so there are likely to be additional enhancements, bug fixes, and controls added over the next few months. Pay close attention to our blog for updates, as we’ll let our readers know when this new feature is released to all Office 365 customers.