​​Transforming security​ with Microsoft Security Exposure Management initiatives​ 

Just as nature sheds its winter coat, it’s time to prune outdated security measures and plant the seeds of a more robust defense. For years, Microsoft Secure Score has served as a foundational tool for organizations to assess their security posture. By providing a numerical representation of security posture based on configurations and recommended controls within Microsoft products, it has offered valuable baseline measurements and helped organizations benchmark their efforts.

However, as cybersecurity practices have matured, the limitations of relying solely on a single aggregate score have become evident. Security professionals and executives now require more granular insights to track specific objectives, address evolving cyberthreats, and effectively communicate the value of security investments. This shift reflects the need for tools that not only measure progress but also enable proactive transformation. In this blog, we’ll explore how Microsoft Security Exposure Management initiatives build on this foundation to offer a renewed perspective on managing cybersecurity risks.

Bridging the gap between security metrics and business outcomes

A single security score, while useful for general benchmarking, can obscure critical vulnerabilities in specific areas. Customer feedback has revealed the need for security teams to simultaneously monitor multiple metrics to achieve a comprehensive understanding of their security posture. Furthermore, executives often struggle to translate these technical metrics into tangible business outcomes, creating a communication gap between security teams and leadership. This understanding has driven the development of security initiatives to provide scores for various security objectives.

Consequently, when security teams can’t track and communicate risks or improvements effectively, critical projects stall, budgets tighten, and the divide between teams and leadership widens. Microsoft Security Exposure Management addresses these challenges by introducing security initiatives, which provide a simple yet powerful way to assess readiness for specific areas or workloads, helping teams view current risks and allocate resources effectively.

Microsoft Security Exposure Management currently includes the following types of initiatives:

• Workload initiatives: Assess and manage risks associated with specific workload domains, such as endpoints, identity resources, and cloud assets.
• Horizontal cyberthreat initiatives: Focus on managing risks for specific cyberthreat areas, such as ransomware protection or business email compromise-financial fraud.
• Cyberthreat analytics initiatives: Based on up-to-date research from Microsoft threat analytics experts, these initiatives assess risks associated with threat actors and vectors as well as reports with actionable recommendations.
• Zero trust initiative: Evaluate risks related to zero trust compliance, aligning with guidance from the zero trust adoption framework.

These initiatives help create a snapshot of an organization’s security posture that both technical teams and business leaders can understand. Helping teams’ scope, discover, prioritize, and validate security findings while ensuring effective communication with stakeholders. Let’s examine some particularly valuable initiatives our customers have found helpful for communicating with leadership.

Key security initiatives that resonate with leadership

“We spend a lot of time on ransomware protection, so something helpful about the ransomware initiative is that you’re now able to start to appreciate the ‘what’, the ‘why’, and the ‘how’ can I improve not only the score, but where’s the low hanging fruit we can tackle?”

—Joe Lykowski, Cyber Defense Leader at Dow Inc.

Ransomware protection

The Ransomware protection initiative provides metrics that instantly resonate with leadership, showing progress indicators from high exposure (0) to no exposure (100). This initiative helps ensure recommended controls are properly configured and utilized, reducing the risk of successful ransomware attacks. By presenting these concrete metrics, you can demonstrate how implementing Microsoft-recommended controls directly minimizes ransomware risks to the business.

Critical asset protection

The critical asset protection initiative helps security teams identify and prioritize the organization’s most valuable assets, show targeted security measures protecting these assets, and demonstrate reduced exposure of mission-critical systems. Critical assets are based on default rules Microsoft Security Exposure Management determined as critical, but users can also create custom roles to tag additional critical assets. By implementing suggested recommendations to boost the Critical Asset Protection initiative score, the organization lowers the risk of cyberattackers being able to circumvent critical assets.

Identity security initiative

The Identity security initiative protects digital identities against phishing, malware, and data breaches. With identity-based cyberattacks continuing to be the primary entry point for breaches, this initiative provides clear metrics on progress that can be easily communicated to leadership. When presenting to boards or fellow executives, security leaders can show concrete improvements in identity protection posture, helping executives understand how investment in this area directly reduces organizational risk.

Beyond ransomware, critical assets, and identity, Microsoft Security Exposure Management continues to develop initiatives that address other vital areas of security. These include cyberattack surface reduction, which minimizes potential entry points for cyberthreats, and data security posture, which helps organizations understand and improve their ability to protect sensitive information. Please click here for our full list of security initiatives.

Security initiatives enable prioritization based on business impact rather than technical severity. Security metrics show current compliance versus target state, critical asset tags highlight high-business-impact systems, and recommendation scoring shows the relative impact of each change.

This data-driven approach helps security leaders make the case for specific investments by showing how they impact the overall security posture score that matters to executives. When budget discussions arise, security leaders can point to specific initiatives and show exactly how investments will improve scores in the areas that matter most to the business.

Embracing clarity over fragmentation with Microsoft Security Exposure Management

Security initiatives solve the fragmentation problem by organizing security metrics around business objectives rather than technical controls. This shift in approach with help from Microsoft Security Exposure Management initiatives, helps security leaders refresh stale conversations with leadership and align security priorities with business objectives. In focusing on initiatives that matter most to your organization and utilizing their clear metrics, you can transform presentations from technical debates into strategic discussions about business risk.

It’s time to refresh how we communicate security to leadership, replacing technical complexity with clarity, and uncertainty with measurable progress. After all, effective security requires not just strong controls, but strong communication. By leveraging Microsoft Security Exposure Management and our security initiatives, organizations can ensure that security investments are clearly tied to business outcomes and strategic goals, fostering a more collaborative and informed approach to cybersecurity

Learn more with Microsoft Security

To learn more about Microsoft Security Exposure Management, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.