Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Health Check

Why Most M365 Tenants Are Under-Secured

Microsoft 365 provides over 300 security and compliance controls. The average enterprise has configured fewer than 40% of them. This gap exists because M365 security is not a single product — it spans Azure AD/Entra ID, Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Purview, Intune, SharePoint admin center, Teams admin center, and Power Platform admin center. No single administrator owns all of these consoles, and security configurations drift over time as features are added and organizational needs change.

The result is predictable: enterprises pass initial compliance audits but develop security gaps over 12-24 months as configurations drift, new features go unconfigured, and organizational changes create permission sprawl. A security health check resets the baseline and identifies the highest-impact remediations.

Health Check Assessment Areas

Microsoft Secure Score Optimization

Secure Score is the starting point because it provides a quantified baseline. The health check analyzes your current score across all four categories, identifies improvement actions ranked by point value and implementation effort, flags quick wins (controls that can be enabled immediately with no user impact), and maps score improvements to specific compliance control requirements. Common high-value improvements include enabling Conditional Access policies for all users (not just admins), configuring anti-phishing policies in Defender for Office 365, enabling unified audit logging with extended retention, deploying sensitivity labels for automatic data classification, and implementing privileged identity management (PIM) for just-in-time admin access.

Permission Audit and Remediation

Permission sprawl is the single largest security risk in most M365 environments. The health check audits SharePoint site collection permissions and inheritance chains, OneDrive sharing links (internal and external), Microsoft Teams membership and guest access, Exchange Online mailbox delegation and shared mailboxes, Azure AD group membership and dynamic group rules, and Power Platform environment permissions and data connectors.

The most dangerous finding is typically "everyone except external users" sharing links in SharePoint — a single misconfigured sharing link can expose sensitive documents to the entire organization. In healthcare environments, this often means PHI is accessible to users outside the care team, violating HIPAA minimum necessary requirements.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Configuration

Purview compliance center controls data governance across M365. The health check evaluates retention policies (are they configured to meet regulatory record-keeping requirements), sensitivity labels (are they deployed and adopted by users), DLP policies (are they effective or generating excessive false positives), communication compliance (is it monitoring for regulatory violations in Teams and email), information barriers (are they configured where required, such as between departments with conflicts of interest), and insider risk management (is it configured to detect high-risk data exfiltration patterns).

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Effectiveness

Many organizations have DLP policies that are either too restrictive (blocking legitimate business activity and generating alert fatigue) or too permissive (not catching actual data loss events). The health check evaluates DLP policy coverage across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and endpoints, analyzes false positive and false negative rates from policy match logs, reviews policy exceptions and overrides for appropriateness, and tests policies against realistic data loss scenarios. Effective DLP requires tuning, not just deployment. EPC Group uses a data-driven approach to DLP optimization that reduces false positives by 60-80% while improving detection of actual data loss events.

Common Findings by Industry

EPC Group vs. Competitors: M365 Security Health Check

Pricing Tiers: M365 Security Health Check

Why EPC Group for M365 Security

EPC Group has been a Microsoft Gold Partner for 29 years with over 10,000 implementations across the most security-sensitive industries. Our founder, Errin O'Connor, is a 4x Microsoft Press bestselling author and former NASA Lead Architect who designed security architectures for mission-critical systems.

• G2 Leader with NPS 100 — consistently the highest-rated Microsoft security consulting firm
• 25-40 point Secure Score improvement is our average first-engagement result
• Pre-built compliance control mappings for HIPAA, SOC 2, and FedRAMP eliminate weeks of manual mapping
• Assessment plus remediation in a single engagement (Better and Best tiers), not separate SOWs
• Non-disruptive methodology using read-only access during assessment phase