What is the identity secure score in Azure Active Directory?
How secure is your Azure AD tenant? If you don't know how to answer this question, this article explains how the identity secure score helps you to monitor and improve your identity security posture.
What is an identity secure score?
The identity secure score is percentage that functions as an indicator for how aligned you are with Microsoft's best practice recommendations for security. Each improvement action in identity secure score is tailored to your specific configuration.
The score helps you to:
- Objectively measure your identity security posture
- Plan identity security improvements
- Review the success of your improvements
You can access the score and related information on the identity secure score dashboard. On this dashboard, you find:
- Your identity secure score
- A comparison graph showing how your Identity secure score compares to other tenants in the same industry and similar size
- A trend graph showing how your Identity secure score has changed over time
- A list of possible improvements
By following the improvement actions, you can:
- Improve your security posture and your score
- Take advantage the features available to your organization as part of your identity investments
How do I get my secure score?
The identity secure score is available in all editions of Azure AD. Organizations can access their identity secure score from the Azure portal > Azure Active Directory > Security > Identity Secure Score.
How does it work?
Every 48 hours, Azure looks at your security configuration and compares your settings with the recommended best practices. Based on the outcome of this evaluation, a new score is calculated for your directory. It’s possible that your security configuration isn’t fully aligned with the best practice guidance and the improvement actions are only partially met. In these scenarios, you will only be awarded a portion of the max score available for the control.
Each recommendation is measured based on your Azure AD configuration. If you are using third-party products to enable a best practice recommendation, you can indicate this configuration in the settings of an improvement action. You also have the option to set recommendations to be ignored if they don't apply to your environment. An ignored recommendation does not contribute to the calculation of your score.
- To address - You recognize that the improvement action is necessary and plan to address it at some point in the future. This state also applies to actions that are detected as partially, but not fully completed.
- Planned - There are concrete plans in place to complete the improvement action.
- Risk accepted - Security should always be balanced with usability, and not every recommendation will work for your environment. When that is the case, you can choose to accept the risk, or the remaining risk, and not enact the improvement action. You won't be given any points, but the action will no longer be visible in the list of improvement actions. You can view this action in history or undo it at any time.
- Resolved through third party and Resolved through alternate mitigation - The improvement action has already been addressed by a third-party application or software, or an internal tool. You'll gain the points that the action is worth, so your score better reflects your overall security posture. If a third party or internal tool no longer covers the control, you can choose another status. Keep in mind, Microsoft will have no visibility into the completeness of implementation if the improvement action is marked as either of these statuses.
How does it help me?
The secure score helps you to:
- Objectively measure your identity security posture
- Plan identity security improvements
- Review the success of your improvements
What you should know
Who can use the identity secure score?
To access identity secure score, you must be assigned one of the following roles in Azure Active Directory.
Read and write roles
With read and write access, you can make changes and directly interact with identity secure score.
- Global administrator
- Security administrator
- Exchange administrator
- SharePoint administrator
Read-only roles
With read-only access, you aren't able to edit status for an improvement action.
- Helpdesk administrator
- User administrator
- Service support administrator
- Security reader
- Security operator
- Global reader
How are controls scored?
Controls can be scored in two ways. Some are scored in a binary fashion - you get 100% of the score if you have the feature or setting configured based on our recommendation. Other scores are calculated as a percentage of the total configuration. For example, if the improvement recommendation states you’ll get a maximum of 10.71% if you protect all your users with MFA and you only have 5 of 100 total users protected, you would be given a partial score around 0.53% (5 protected / 100 total * 10.71% maximum = 0.53% partial score).
What does [Not Scored] mean?
Actions labeled as [Not Scored] are ones you can perform in your organization but won't be scored because they aren't hooked up in the tool (yet!). So, you can still improve your security, but you won't get credit for those actions right now.
How often is my score updated?
The score is calculated once per day (around 1:00 AM PST). If you make a change to a measured action, the score will automatically update the next day. It takes up to 48 hours for a change to be reflected in your score.
My score changed. How do I figure out why?
Head over to the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, where you’ll find your complete Microsoft secure score. You can easily see all the changes to your secure score by reviewing the in-depth changes on the history tab.
Does the secure score measure my risk of getting breached?
In short, no. The secure score does not express an absolute measure of how likely you are to get breached. It expresses the extent to which you have adopted features that can offset the risk of being breached. No service can guarantee that you will not be breached, and the secure score should not be interpreted as a guarantee in any way.
How should I interpret my score?
Your score improves for configuring recommended security features or performing security-related tasks (like reading reports). Some actions are scored for partial completion, like enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your users. Your secure score is directly representative of the Microsoft security services you use. Remember that security must be balanced with usability. All security controls have a user impact component. Controls with low user impact should have little to no effect on your users' day-to-day operations.
To see your score history, head over to the Microsoft 365 Defender portal and review your overall Microsoft secure score. You can review changes to your overall secure score be clicking on View History. Choose a specific date to see which controls were enabled for that day and what points you earned for each one.
How does the identity secure score relate to the Microsoft 365 secure score?
The Microsoft secure score contains five distinct control and score categories:
- Identity
- Data
- Devices
- Infrastructure
- Apps
The identity secure score represents the identity part of the Microsoft secure score. This overlap means that your recommendations for the identity secure score and the identity score in Microsoft are the same.
Next steps
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