Reviewing Azure AD Identity Secure Score

Azure AD Identity Secure Score enables you to make informed decision-making to protect your Azure AD tenancy.

This recipe will teach you how to monitor and improve your Azure AD Identity Secure Score.

We will take you through reviewing the Azure AD Identity Secure Score dashboard for your Azure AD tenancy environments and look at the actionable insights available to improve your secure score and security posture.

Getting ready

This recipe requires the following:

• A device with a browser, such as Edge or Chrome, to access the Azure portal: https://portal.azure.com
• You should sign into the Azure portal with an account with the Global Administrator role

How to do it…

This recipe consists of the following tasks:

• Reviewing Identity Secure Score
• Updating the improvement actions status

Task – Reviewing Identity Secure Score

Perform the following steps:

1. From the Azure portal, go to Azure Active Directory | Security | Identity Secure Score.

Alternatively, in the search bar, type azure ad identity secure score; click on Azure AD Identity Secure Score from the list of services shown.

2. You will now see the Identity Secure Score blade.
3. The top section of the Identity Secure Score screen represents your identity security posture:

Figure 1.3 – Secure Score screen

This area of the screen shows three aspects to review:

• Secure Score for Identity is a percentage of your alignment with Microsoft’s best practice security recommendations
• Comparison is your security posture management compared to other tenants of a similar size
• Score history is a trend graph over time

4. The lower section of the Identity Secure Score screen provides a list of recommended and possible security Improvement actions.

Each recommended improvement action has a Score Impact, User Impact, Implementation Cost, Max Score possible, and Current Score:

Figure 1.4 – The Improvement actions screen

5. Click Download; you can access the improvement actions in a CSV file:

Figure 1.5 – Improvement actions download

6. By clicking on an Improvement action, you can see further information:

Figure 1.6 – Improvement actions information

With that, you have reviewed Identity Secure Score. In the next task, we will update the status of improvement actions.

Task – Updating the improvement actions status

Perform the following steps:

1. Select an Improvement action and click to open it.
2. From the Improvement action screen, on the STATUS section, select the status you wish to update the action to and then click Save:

Figure 1.7 – Improvement actions status options

With that, you have updated the status of improvement actions. This concludes the hands-on tasks for this recipe.

How it works…

In this recipe, we reviewed the information presented in the Azure AD identities Secure Score and took action from available insights.

• The Azure ID Identity Secure Score overlaps with the identity score used for the Microsoft secure score, which means the recommendations will be the same.
• The Azure AD Identity Secure Score provides a value of between 1% and 100%, representing how well your Azure AD tenancy is secured based on Microsoft’s best practices and recommendations.

You can also see actionable improvement insights on how your score can be improved and each improvement’s impact on the secure score.

The dashboard and a score history timeline show a comparison of your environment’s Azure AD tenancy to a tenancy of the same size and industry average.

Your environment’s Azure AD tenancy identity settings are compared with best practice recommendations once a day (approx 1:00 A.M. PST); changes made to an improvement action may not be reflected in the score for up to 48 hours.

See also

Should you require further information, you can refer to the following Microsoft Learn articles:

• What is the identity secure score in Azure Active Directory?: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/identity-secure-score
• Azure Active Directory fundamentals documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals