What’s Your Microsoft Secure Score? (And Why It Makes a SMARTER ISO 27001 Objective)

Most leadership teams can tell you their revenue, their customer numbers and their safety record. Far fewer can tell you, in a single number, how well their core IT environment is actually configured against attack. If your organisation runs on Microsoft 365, that number already exists. It is called your Microsoft Secure Score, and it is one of the most useful (and underused) security metrics available to Australian businesses.

It is often called the “Microsoft security score”, but the official name is Secure Score. Whatever you call it, it answers a simple question: of the security controls Microsoft makes available to you, how many have you actually turned on and configured properly? Below we cover where to find it, how to improve it, the benefits of doing so, and why it makes an excellent, truly measurable objective for an ISO/IEC 27001 information security management system.

What is Microsoft Secure Score?

Microsoft Secure Score is a numerical summary of your security posture across your Microsoft environment: your identities, devices, apps and data. You earn points for enabling and configuring recommended security controls (for example, enforcing multi-factor authentication, blocking legacy authentication, or switching on the right Defender policies). The more recommended controls you have in place, the higher your score, expressed both as points and as a percentage of the points available to your licences.

The score is dynamic. As you implement an action it generally updates within about 24 hours, so improvements show up quickly, and so does any backsliding if a control is switched off. Microsoft also lets you benchmark your score against organisations of a similar size and industry, which turns an abstract number into useful context: are you ahead of, or behind, comparable businesses?

Where to find your Secure Score

Your Secure Score lives in the Microsoft Defender portal at security.microsoft.com. Sign in with an account that has the right permissions (a Global Administrator, Security Administrator, or a read-only role such as Security Reader or Global Reader), then look for Secure Score in the left-hand navigation under the Exposure management / posture area. You will land on a dashboard showing your current score, a history graph of how it has trended over time, a breakdown by category, the comparison benchmarks, and, most importantly, a list of recommended actions.

Secure Score is included with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and the E3/E5 plans. If you are on a lighter plan you will still see a score, but some of the higher-value recommendations will be greyed out until the relevant licence is in place.

How to improve your Secure Score

The work happens on the Recommended actions tab. Microsoft ranks each recommendation by the points on offer against the effort and user impact involved, so the controls that give you the biggest improvement for the least disruption float to the top. A sensible approach:

• Start with the high-impact, low-effort wins. Enforcing multi-factor authentication, disabling legacy authentication protocols and protecting administrator accounts are perennial top recommendations and shut down a huge proportion of real-world attacks.
• Read each recommendation before you action it. Microsoft explains what the control does, the user impact, and step-by-step implementation. Test changes that affect sign-in or mail flow before rolling them out broadly.
• Use the status options honestly. Each action can be marked Planned, Risk accepted, Resolved through third party, or Resolved through alternate mitigation. If another tool already covers a control, record that. The score should reflect reality, not punish you for a sensible architectural choice.
• Review regularly. New recommendations appear as Microsoft adds capabilities and as your tenant changes. A monthly or quarterly review keeps the score moving and stops it quietly drifting down.

A word of balance: the goal is genuine risk reduction, not a perfect 100%. Some controls will not suit your business, and chasing every last point can introduce friction with little security benefit. Secure Score is a guide and a prioritisation tool; your context still matters. It also sits neatly alongside the Australian Signals Directorate’s Essential Eight; many of the top recommendations map directly to those mitigation strategies.

The benefits of working on your Secure Score

• A single, objective measure of how well your Microsoft environment is hardened, with no guesswork and no opinion.
• A prioritised roadmap rather than a vague “improve security” intention; the platform tells you what to do next and what it is worth.
• Evidence of due diligence for boards, insurers, clients and auditors that you are actively managing cyber risk.
• Early warning when a control is turned off or a new gap appears, because the score moves.
• Benchmarking against similar organisations, so you know whether “good” is actually good enough.

Why Secure Score makes a SMARTER ISO 27001 objective

Clause 6.2 of ISO/IEC 27001:2022 requires an organisation to establish information security objectives that are measurable (where practicable), monitored, communicated and updated. In practice, many organisations struggle to write security objectives that are genuinely measurable. They end up with woolly statements that are impossible to evaluate at the next management review.

Secure Score solves that problem elegantly, because it is a real number that already exists. It maps almost perfectly onto the SMARTER objectives framework we recommend for management system objectives:

A simple objective such as “improve our Microsoft Secure Score from 58% to 75% by the end of the financial year, reviewed quarterly” ticks every box clause 6.2 asks for, gives the team a clear and motivating target, and produces a ready-made trail of evidence for your certification auditor.

Turning the number into a system

Secure Score is a fantastic starting point, but a score on a dashboard is not a management system. The real value comes from wrapping it in the discipline of information security and AI governance: assigning ownership of actions, documenting the risks you have accepted, communicating objectives to the people who can influence them, and reviewing progress at management review. That is exactly the structure ISO 27001 provides.

If you would like help setting meaningful, measurable security objectives, and building the ISO 27001 system around them, you will work directly with an experienced ISO auditor, and our systems are built to certify first time. Email hello@streamline.business, call Brisbane 07 3667 8280, Sydney 02 8315 7780 or Melbourne 03 9034 3990, or get in touch here.