The Best things to do with Microsoft 365
Microsoft Secure Score - WST

Most small- to medium-sized institutions don’t have a full-time employee available to devote to Microsoft 365 administration and security. If you are the person spinning about two dozen plates including administration of 365, you know this.

Also, you probably know through your vendor management program what Microsoft is (and is not) responsible for. For example, Microsoft supplies the administration of a global cloud infrastructure to host your resources; however, Microsoft does not manage the security and access to your data.

There’s a learning curve to understanding what configuration changes to make in order for you to ensure the data and access are properly configured. Sure, you can Google-fu things like best practices for cloud security, and likely implement some good strategies. But how do you know you haven’t missed something, or worse, taken bad advice?

Microsoft has provided tools to help assess your security posture. Tools like Microsoft Secure Score which provides “a measurement of an organization's security posture…” That’s right, they have designed a tool that analyzes your configuration efforts and spits out a number to “score” your efforts.

Even if you’re a 365 expert, or if you’re not and unsure of your security posture in 365, use this tool. Glean from it what you can and make decisions. Information can only help manage the limited sanity left for spinning plates. You can access your score at https://security.microsoft.com/securescore.

Also, get familiar with https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/>. Microsoft is changing things all the time. Administrator resources that were once in one admin portal or Azure blade a month ago are often moved and consolidated somewhere else. It can be frustrating trying to keep up with the changes or even find current documentation. There is also a lot of good information outside of Microsoft documentation, so Google is your friend. Microsoft also has RSS and Twitter feeds to help keep you up to date on changes that are occurring. You can find this info at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftLearnBlog. Also consider signing into the Microsoft documentation with your 365 credentials and updating your account settings to get content update notifications sent to your email.

This is the first in a short series of Microsoft 365 tips, look for more in the coming weeks!

Authored by: Mike Smith, AWS-CCP