Microsoft Office 365 has recently announced a useful new security analytics service. Known as Office 365 Secure Score, this tool does a holistic analysis of your Office 365 environment in terms of how secure it is while suggesting refinements that can further reduce your overall risk.
Microsoft was cognizant to note that severity is not categorized into “high,” “medium,” and “low” as is seen across other frameworks, but instead has outlined the results in a way where incremental actions can be made to gradually improve security scores. It also doesn’t express an absolute measure on the likelihood of a breach, but it does give you pointers to follow to keep your infrastructure secure.
Interestingly, since there are so many people also scoring their infrastructure, Microsoft has also created a score comparison chart, giving IT administrators a bird’s eye view of how you stack up against the competition. Perhaps that’d motivate the lazier admins among you to get cracking on security.
After the security scores are tabulated, it’s time to get to work. A modeler lets you see at a glance how many actions you’d want to review, and if implemented, what the revised score will be. An action pane gives you a description of the control, why it’s an effective mitigation, and what was observed. A remediation pane fly-out explains that will be changed and the user impact. A “launch now” link is coming which will allow you to make desired changes right from the interface.
Scores will change as vulnerabilities are exposed and problems are addressed. That’s why the Secure Score also features a score analyzer to see progress on risk mitigation over time. Data can also be exported to PDF and CSV.
Microsoft informs us that Secure Score will be improved and enhanced over time. For now, though, it looks like one of those amazing tools for any admin to utilize to ensure that their infrastructure is as secure as it possibly can be.
Image credit: Microsoft
