Microsoft Secure Score, What It Is, What’s a Good Number, and How to Improve Yours

If you have Microsoft 365 and you’ve never looked at your Secure Score, you’re missing one of the most useful free tools Microsoft provides.

What Is Microsoft Secure Score?

A numerical score calculated based on how well you’ve implemented security controls and best practices for your licence type. Found in the Microsoft Defender portal under Secure Score. Each recommended action has a point value, complete it and your score increases.

What’s a Good Score?

For a Business Premium tenant: above 50% indicates reasonable baseline security. Above 70% suggests well-managed posture. Below 30% means fundamental controls are missing.

More useful than the absolute score is what the top recommended actions are.

The Highest-Impact Actions

• •Enable MFA for all users: consistently the highest-impact action
• •Block legacy authentication protocols: they bypass MFA entirely
• •Ensure all Global Admins have MFA registered
• •Enable DKIM for your domain
• •Require dedicated admin accounts for privileged roles
• •Reduce Global Admin count to 4 or fewer

What Secure Score Won’t Tell You

• •Whether your users can recognise a phishing email
• •Whether you have a tested incident response plan
• •Whether your backups are actually working
• •Whether admin accounts use hardware security keys vs SMS-based MFA

Secure Score is a good starting point and useful benchmark. It’s one tool among many.