Follow me on Twitter @AntonioMaio2

Monday, August 14, 2017

Raise Your Office 365 Secure Score

Thanks to everyone that attended our webinar last week on Office 365 Secure Score.

For many organizations moving to Office 365 or other Cloud services, the concepts of security, compliance and risk are complex. They require learning about how these security concepts have changed and how they’re now implemented in a Cloud first, Mobile friendly world. They often require working with security experts to evaluate the current state of the security for the Cloud application that you’re concerned about… and determining which security capabilities and features you are and are not yet making use of.

When we worked in on premise server environments, things seemed almost easier in some ways because our server farms which hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business and so on were all within our corporate networks. They were more under our control, and we felt some level of comfort from being able to stop internet traffic at the network boundary, usually through our firewalls or gateways.
Regardless of how truly secure our not our networks and applications in fact were, we often gained some comfort from this boundary.

With the advent of Cloud computing, with the desire to do work on a whole range of Mobile devices, even our own personal devices, and with the desire to access our services for work from anywhere in the world, moving to services which are hosted on servers and in data centers that are not under our control often feels like we’ve lost that comfort… that assurance that we’re controlling the security of our critical IT services, or it feels that we’ve given the management of our security over to someone else (that we can’t see, that we can’t talk to and that we don’t know).

When, in actuality, often services like Office 365 are more secure than we could have ever hoped to deploy in our own environments… often we have more control over how our services are secured than we’ve ever had. We often just aren’t aware yet of the security benefits that come out of box with Office 365, and we’re not aware of the security capabilities that are available for us to use.

Office 365 Secure Score is a security analytics tool from Microsoft that comes with your Office 365 subscription. Its built to help us understand and navigate all of the security options that are available to us in Office 365.

It’s a relatively new feature from Microsoft, released early this year. Its purpose is really to:
  • Help us understand our current security posture
  • Help us understand which security features we are using and not yet using
  • Help us understand the impact of rolling out new security features to our end users and administrators, and what the security benefits are to us
  • Help us understand how we can improve our security posture, and it even tracks our progress over time

My presentation slides are available here:


Please reach out and let me know if you have any questions.

Enjoy.
-Antonio