Good day everybody! Kevin Baylor, Alliance IT. I just want to take a minute and talk about something I haven’t talked about in a while, at least not in 5 minutes, that’s security.
Office 365, they have their own security center and whether you are an admin in your organization or you’re in IT or you’re working with somebody in IT, checking out your secure score in the security center in Office 365 is something you should be doing on a quarterly basis. If not, potentially a monthly basis, depending on the size of your organization and how much things in your organization may change.
So, log into Portal.Office.com. Go to the admin section. If you don’t see it, you can click on the little dotted menu up here and you go to admin. Once you are in the admin section, you are going to go down here to the security center, security and compliance, and you got the new fancy look that Microsoft has released in their portal recently.
Once you are in security and compliance, that’s going to bring you over to the screen that kind of looks like this and you’re going to see your Microsoft secure score over here. So scroll down to there, select your Microsoft secure score, and it will take you to that detailed pane.
What this is, this just gave you overview and a suggestion. So this changes constantly. Three months ago, the top score might have been 650 and you might have had 380 points. You were looking really good. Well now, Microsoft says, “Hey, these things are new anomalies or new security risks and you need to do this to prevent them.” So the more risks that are out there, the more vulnerabilities, then the more things you need to do. Thus, the higher end that number is and then potentially the lower your score is if you haven’t implemented these new things.
This is something that you should be looking at on a regular basis. It gives you a really good insight as to what you are doing, how you compare to other organizations of your size, gives you severity levels. So if it’s something that’s really important like multifactor authentication, that is something that everybody should be doing whether it’s tied into your active directory or tied into your email or tied into ten different apps that you have. Some sort out 2-factor or multifactor authentication should be in place.
So this gives you that insight whether you’ve done it or not, different policies and rules that you should implement depending on what apps you are using, what plan you have with Microsoft 365 or Office 365. So those numbers are going to be different for every organization. It’s going to change on a constant basis so it’s something that you should go in here and look at.
Be a part of your management meetings or your IT strategy. It’s not something you just want to glance at once a year. This is something that’s really important. So whether you’re the – somebody in your organization to be responsible for this or you’re working with an IT provider, make sure we are checking Microsoft security score. And if your IT provider or IT Department is talking to you about it, pay attention. It is important.
Stay safe. Stay secure. Have a great day. Thank you.
