Help CenterIn today’s digital world, protecting your organization’s Microsoft 365 (M365) environment is critical. With increasing cyber threats and data breaches, having a clear picture of your security posture is essential to ensure your data, users, and operations are secure. Microsoft provides a great starting point for assessing your security with Microsoft Secure Score, a tool designed to help you measure and improve your security configuration. However, tools like Griffin31 go beyond what Secure Score offers by providing more detailed insights, real-time monitoring, and better prioritization for closing security gaps.
What Is Microsoft Secure Score?
Microsoft Secure Score is a security analytics tool that provides a measurement of your organization’s security posture within the M365 ecosystem. By tracking how well your organization is following security best practices, Secure Score assigns a numerical value that reflects your current level of security. Secure Score also gives recommendations for improving your security posture by implementing security controls and features that enhance data protection, access management, and compliance.
Key Features of Secure Score:
- Security Measurement: Gives a numerical representation of your organization’s security posture.
- Actionable Recommendations: Provides clear recommendations on how to improve security by enabling or configuring specific features.
- Benchmarking: Compares your score against industry averages and similar organizations to help you gauge where you stand.
- Progress Tracking: Helps track your security improvements over time as you implement recommended changes.
How Microsoft Secure Score Helps Strengthen Security
1. Comprehensive Overview of Security Health
Secure Score gives a top-level view of your organization’s current security standing, summarizing configurations and security features that can be optimized.
2. Actionable Recommendations
Secure Score provides prioritized recommendations based on best practices to help you strengthen security. These include enabling Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), applying conditional access policies, and managing data loss prevention (DLP) policies.
3. Benchmarking and Progress Tracking
You can track your security progress over time and compare your organization’s score against industry benchmarks to understand how your security posture aligns with others in your sector.
4. Informed Decision-Making
With prioritized recommendations, you can make decisions that focus on the highest security risks and allocate resources accordingly.
Why Griffin31 is Better Than Microsoft Secure Score
While Secure Score provides a great foundation for improving your security, Griffin31 offers a far more advanced and practical approach to monitoring, prioritizing, and remediating security gaps in your M365 environment. Here’s why Griffin31 surpasses Secure Score:
# 1. Detailed User Impact Analysis Before Closing Gaps
One of the key advantages of Griffin31 is its detailed analysis of user impact before you implement any remediation. When security gaps are identified, Griffin31 provides insights into how closing those gaps will affect users, enabling you to make informed decisions. This allows security teams to mitigate risks with minimal disruption to users and business operations.
Why It Matters:
- Understanding the potential impact on users ensures that security fixes don’t negatively impact productivity.
- Informed decision-making prevents unnecessary disruptions while still improving your security posture.
# 2. Compliance Data Built Into the System
Griffin31 integrates all relevant compliance data directly into the system, offering an out-of-the-box solution for organizations that need to adhere to regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA. This allows you to track compliance requirements alongside security configurations, ensuring that your organization remains compliant while improving security.
Why It Matters:
- Organizations can ensure that their security improvements align with regulatory requirements.
- It reduces the complexity of managing both security and compliance in separate silos.
# 3. Prioritization via Stories, Sprints, and Projects
Griffin31 offers a unique feature called “Stories,” which breaks down security configurations into sprints and projects based on security domains and attack vectors. This helps security teams prioritize fixes based on the most critical attack vectors and security domains, ensuring that high-risk issues are addressed first.
Why It Matters:
- Security teams can focus on the most urgent vulnerabilities or misconfigurations based on the likelihood and impact of potential attacks.
- Griffin31’s structured approach enables better organization and progress tracking, akin to agile project management for security teams.
# 4. Quick Wins for Efficient Remediation
Griffin31 also identifies quick wins, which are misconfigurations that require minimal effort to remediate but offer a significant security boost with little to no expected user impact. This feature helps organizations quickly strengthen their security posture without committing to long, complex remediation processes.
Why It Matters:
- Unlike Secure Score, which might present a complex misconfiguration that could take months to resolve, Griffin31 enables you to tackle smaller but equally important issues in the meantime.
- Quick wins allow for continuous improvement and protection without major disruptions to users or operations.
# 5. Better Resource Management
Griffin31’s approach to prioritization and quick wins helps security teams manage their time and resources more effectively. Instead of focusing on a single, time-consuming fix, Griffin31 helps organizations address multiple smaller issues that offer significant security improvements.
Why It Matters:
- Security teams can avoid focusing solely on large, resource-intensive projects that may take months to complete, thereby improving security faster.
- It allows for more strategic resource allocation by balancing large projects with smaller, impactful fixes.
The Difference in Approach
While Secure Score provides you with a security measurement and recommended actions, Griffin31 goes much further by offering a comprehensive, real-time solution to monitoring, remediating, and prioritizing security gaps.
- Secure Score gives an overview but does not account for the real-time nature of security changes or the complexities of prioritizing fixes based on user impact.
- Griffin31 is designed to help organizations maintain continuous security improvements with real-time monitoring, detailed user impact analysis, and quick wins that Secure Score doesn’t provide.
Conclusion: Griffin31 Delivers a Smarter Security Strategy
Microsoft Secure Score is an excellent tool for measuring and improving your organization’s security posture in the M365 environment. However, for organizations that want to go beyond a basic score, Griffin31 offers a more powerful and actionable approach. With detailed user impact assessments, built-in compliance tracking, and prioritization via quick wins and security projects, Griffin31 provides an advanced framework for strengthening your M365 security posture.
Griffin31 allows security teams to focus on what matters most—real-time threat mitigation, impactful quick wins, and ensuring that every security improvement aligns with the organization’s business needs and compliance requirements. Together, Secure Score and Griffin31 can provide a comprehensive and proactive security approach for your M365 environment, ensuring that your organization stays secure, compliant, and resilient against emerging cyber threats.