Cloud Security: Protect Your Microsoft 365, Azure, and SaaS Applications

Microsoft 365 provides security defaults that offer a baseline level of protection — requiring MFA for admin accounts, blocking legacy authentication, and enabling basic alerting. However, these defaults are intentionally conservative to minimize friction for initial deployment. They do not enforce MFA for all users, do not implement risk-based conditional access, do not audit OAuth application permissions, and do not configure data loss prevention policies. Most organizations that have not actively hardened their M365 tenant have meaningful security gaps. Our cloud security assessment identifies those gaps with a prioritized remediation plan.

A Conditional Access policy is a rule that governs when and how users can access Microsoft 365 services, based on conditions like who the user is, what device they're on, where they are signing in from, and what application they're accessing. Example policies include: require MFA when signing in from outside your corporate network, block access from countries you don't do business in, require a compliant device to access SharePoint, or force a password reset when a sign-in is flagged as high-risk. Without Conditional Access policies, a compromised account can be used from anywhere with no additional friction. Conditional access is the single highest-impact M365 security control for most organizations.

The Shared Responsibility Model is Microsoft's framework for describing what security obligations Microsoft owns versus what the customer owns. Microsoft is responsible for the physical security of data centers, the availability of the cloud platform, and the security of the underlying infrastructure. Customers are responsible for their data, their identities, their configurations, and their applications running on the platform. In practice, this means that Microsoft will not prevent your users from clicking phishing links, will not stop a compromised admin account from exfiltrating data, and will not configure your conditional access policies. Those are your responsibilities — and ours, as your security partner.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (formerly MCAS) is a powerful tool — but a tool that requires configuration and active monitoring to deliver value. Out of the box, it generates findings and alerts but requires tuning, policy configuration, and an analyst team reviewing its output. Organizations that deploy Defender for Cloud Apps without configuring discovery policies, session controls, and anomaly detection alerts often have the license but not the protection. We evaluate your Defender for Cloud Apps configuration during our assessment and, for managed clients, we monitor its alerts and maintain its policies as part of our cloud security service.

Our primary cloud security expertise is in the Microsoft ecosystem — Microsoft 365, Entra ID, and Azure — which aligns with the majority of our client base. For organizations on Google Workspace, we can conduct security assessments and provide hardening guidance, but our continuous managed security service is optimized for Microsoft environments. If your organization is evaluating a migration from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, we can advise on the security posture implications and support the security configuration of the new M365 tenant from day one.