Security is difficult to govern when the only available answer is, “It is being handled.” Trust in your internal team or security provider matters, but leaders also need evidence. They need to know what is protected, what needs attention, what's changed, whether risk is improving, and which decisions require their involvement.
That is the purpose of cybersecurity visibility. It turns signals from devices, identities, applications, incidents, vulnerabilities, and security controls into a current, understandable view of your security program. Effective visibility does not give every leader access to every log. It gives each decision-maker enough reliable context to understand where the organization stands and what should happen next.
The challenge is rarely a complete lack of data. Microsoft security tools and other platforms can produce alerts, logs, recommendations, scores, and reports across the environment. The visibility gap appears when those signals remain scattered, lack context, or never become priorities and accountable work.
Closing that gap requires five steps: identify where security data lives, separate activity from insight, define what leaders need to see, turn visibility into priorities, and establish a managed rhythm for improvement.
Contents of Article
What Is Cybersecurity Visibility?
Security monitoring, reporting, and visibility are not the same
Why does cybersecurity visibility matter?
What Should Your Security Visibility Help You Understand?
What Should a Microsoft Security Dashboard Show?
Device health and security coverage
Users and authentication methods
Sign-in activity and access patterns
Security incidents and response
Microsoft 365 cloud security posture
Step 1: Identify Where Security Data Lives
Step 2: Separate Security Activity From Security Insight
Step 3: Define What Leaders Need to See
What is protected, and where is coverage incomplete?
Step 4: Turn Cybersecurity Visibility Into Priorities
First: Address immediate, meaningful risk
Next: Plan and budget for important improvements
Monitor: Keep lower-priority risk visible
Step 5: Build a Managed Rhythm for Improvement
What Security Scores and Dashboards Cannot Tell You Alone
How Managed Security Helps Close the Visibility Gap
When Security Partner adds value
What Is Cybersecurity Visibility?
Cybersecurity visibility is your organization’s ability to see and understand the current state of security across its people, devices, identities, applications, cloud services, data, controls, vulnerabilities, and incidents.
Good visibility should help your team answer four connected questions:
- What is happening: Security activity, events, alerts, changes, and trends.
- What does it mean: The affected assets, users, business processes, and risk level.
- What are we doing about it: Investigation, remediation, accepted risk, or planned improvement.
- What needs to happen next: The decision, owner, priority, and expected timeline.
This goes beyond access to a security portal. A portal can contain thousands of data points and still leave leaders unable to explain whether security is improving. Visibility exists when those data points can be organized into a coherent view of coverage, risk, performance, and action.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 describes cybersecurity as a set of connected outcomes across Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. That structure reinforces why visibility cannot stop at alerts. An organization also needs insight into assets, safeguards, response, recovery, ownership, and governance.
Security monitoring, reporting, and visibility are not the same
These terms are related, but they serve different purposes.
| Capability | Primary purpose | Useful question |
|---|---|---|
| Security monitoring | Observe systems and evaluate activity for threats, failures, and changes | What is happening right now? |
| Security reporting | Organize selected data into summaries, metrics, and trends | What happened during this period? |
| Security visibility | Connect activity and reporting to scope, context, risk, ownership, and decisions | What does this mean for the business, and what should happen next? |
Monitoring may show that an alert occurred. Reporting may show how many alerts occurred during the month. Visibility should help explain whether those alerts represented true threats, which users or devices were affected, how they were handled, how long resolution took, whether a recurring pattern exists, and whether any business decision is required.
More data does not automatically create more visibility. In some cases, it creates more noise. The goal is to make the right information understandable to the people responsible for acting on it.
Why does cybersecurity visibility matter?
Security decisions compete with other business priorities. Leaders cannot approve resources, accept risk, evaluate performance, or communicate with stakeholders confidently when the current security picture is unclear.
Meaningful visibility helps an organization:
- Verify that expected protections are deployed and operating across the intended users and devices.
- Identify gaps, exceptions, and changes before they remain unnoticed for long periods.
- Distinguish high-impact work from lower-priority technical noise.
- Evaluate whether security investments are improving posture over time.
- Give IT teams, security teams, providers, and leadership a shared source of truth.
- Support clearer answers to boards, customers, insurers, auditors, and business partners.
- Preserve accountability by connecting findings and recommendations to owners and deadlines.
Visibility does not eliminate uncertainty or guarantee that an incident will not occur. It allows the organization to manage security with evidence instead of assumptions.
What Should Your Security Visibility Help You Understand?
A useful visibility program should give leaders a clear view of five areas. These are the same five questions emphasized in the downloadable guide, but each requires more than a single chart or status indicator.
| Leadership question | What a useful answer includes | Why it matters |
| What is protected, and what remains vulnerable? | Assets and users in scope, control coverage, health status, exceptions, and known gaps | Shows whether protections reach the environment the organization believes they cover |
| What needs attention? | Active incidents, urgent vulnerabilities, risky users or devices, overdue work, and missing controls | Directs limited time and resources toward meaningful risk |
| What has changed? | New assets, users, vulnerabilities, policies, alerts, configurations, and risk patterns | Prevents a point-in-time report from becoming an outdated assumption |
| What is improving? | Trends in coverage, authentication, exposure, remediation, incident handling, and control implementation | Helps show whether effort and investment are producing measurable progress |
| What needs a decision? | Budget requests, policy choices, accepted risks, priorities, deadlines, and vendor or project decisions | Makes leadership’s role clear and keeps unresolved risk from disappearing into technical reports |
Don't present the same information identically to everyone. A security analyst may need event-level detail. An IT manager may need coverage, exceptions, remediation status, and ownership. Executive leadership may need trends, material risks, progress, and decisions. Strong reporting preserves a consistent underlying story while adjusting detail for the audience.
What Should a Microsoft Security Dashboard Show?
Microsoft security technologies can generate detailed information about identities, devices, applications, incidents, configurations, and vulnerabilities. The practical challenge is turning that information into a view that an organization can use consistently.
A Microsoft security dashboard should not be designed around the question, “What data can the platform display?” It should be designed around the questions your IT team and leaders need to answer.
The exact data available depends on your Microsoft licensing, deployed products, configuration, permissions, and connected data sources. Within a managed Microsoft security program, the following six views can create a more complete picture.
Device health and security coverage
Device visibility begins with knowing which machines are present, whether they are onboarded into the expected security tools, and whether those tools are communicating properly.
A useful device view may show:
- Total machines and machine types
- Online, inactive, or otherwise unhealthy devices
- Security or onboarding status
- Coverage changes as machines are added or removed
- Device health trends over time
- Devices that may require investigation or remediation
These metrics answer a foundational question: Are the machines the business depends on visible to the security program? A protection platform cannot reliably monitor a device it does not know exists or cannot communicate with.
The number of onboarded devices also needs context. A growing count may reflect successful deployment, business growth, or duplicate and stale records. A falling count may reflect planned retirement or an unexpected coverage issue. The trend becomes useful when someone is responsible for explaining the change.
Users and authentication methods
Identity visibility should show more than the total number of users. It should help your team understand who those users are, how they authenticate, and where stronger controls are or are not being used.
A useful user dashboard may include:
- Member, guest, administrative, disabled, and other relevant user types
- Users registered or capable of multifactor authentication
- MFA adoption and coverage
- Authentication methods in use, such as passwordless methods, Windows Hello for Business, one-time passcodes, email, phone, or security questions
- Users with incomplete, weak, or unexpected authentication configurations
- Changes in user and authentication populations over time
Microsoft’s Authentication methods activity includes visualizations for method registration and actual usage. That distinction is important. A user may be registered for a method without relying on it consistently, and a headline percentage may hide differences between administrators, employees, guests, and service identities.
The dashboard's purpose is not to reward more authentication methods. It is to determine whether authentication practices match the organization’s security requirements and whether exceptions are understood.
Sign-in activity and access patterns
Sign-in visibility helps explain how identities are interacting with the Microsoft environment. Useful reporting may show:
- Interactive, non-interactive, service principal, and managed identity sign-ins
- Successful and failed sign-in events
- Where sign-ins appear to originate
- Which applications and resources users access
- Sign-in activity by device, browser, or operating system
- When sign-ins occur and whether timing differs from expected behavior
- Whether multifactor authentication or Conditional Access requirements were applied
Microsoft Entra sign-in activity includes the identity involved, the application used, the resource accessed, device details, authentication methods, Conditional Access results, and other context. Microsoft also cautions that IP-based location is a best-effort estimate. Treat location as one signal, not automatic proof that a sign-in is legitimate or malicious. See Microsoft’s sign-in activity details.
A chart showing sign-ins by country, application, or hour can reveal patterns, but you still need to interpret them. An unusual location may reflect travel or a VPN. A high-volume application may be expected. A sign-in outside normal hours may be legitimate for one role and unusual for another.
For a practical example of why identity activity needs context, see Threat Hunting for Azure PowerShell Logins: Why Admin Tool Usage Matters.
Security incidents and response
An incident dashboard should help leaders see both the volume of security work and the quality of the response.
Useful incident reporting may include:
- Incidents created, investigated, and resolved
- Incident status and severity
- True positives, false positives, and informational activity
- Average time to investigate or resolve
- When incidents tend to trigger
- Affected users, devices, applications, or other assets
- Relationships between incident severity and resolution time
- Actions completed by the security team and actions that still require the client
Microsoft Defender distinguishes alerts from incidents. Alerts are signals from threat detections, while incidents correlate related alerts into a broader attack story. That is why reporting only the number of alerts can be misleading. Ten related alerts may represent one incident, and one high-impact incident may matter more than hundreds of lower-value signals. Microsoft’s incident and alert guidance also emphasizes timelines, affected assets, evidence, investigation, and response.
Resolution time needs similar context. A longer resolution time does not automatically indicate poor performance if the incident was complex, required business input, or remained open for observation. A short resolution time does not prove that the investigation was complete. The most useful view connects severity, classification, affected assets, required actions, and outcome.
Microsoft 365 cloud security posture
Cloud posture reporting should show whether security recommendations and controls are being adopted across Microsoft 365 and how that posture changes over time.
A useful cloud security view may include:
- Microsoft Secure Score and its trend
- Completed, planned, accepted, or unresolved recommended actions
- The identity, device, application, data, or cloud domains affecting the score
- Deployment coverage for relevant controls, including attack surface reduction rules where applicable
- Changes in posture after policies or configurations are implemented
- Areas where licensing, operations, or business requirements affect a recommendation
Microsoft Secure Score measures how well recommended security actions are implemented across supported products. Microsoft describes it as a way to report posture, improve visibility and control, compare benchmarks, and establish key performance indicators.
Secure Score should not be treated as a grade or a promise that the organization cannot be breached. Microsoft explicitly notes that it is not an absolute measurement of breach likelihood. Not every recommendation will fit every environment, and security must be balanced with usability and business requirements.
The more valuable question is not simply, “What is our score?” It is, “What changed the score, which recommendations matter most here, what have we chosen to do, and what risk remains?”
Vulnerabilities and exposure
Risk reporting should help the organization understand which vulnerabilities and exposures deserve attention, how long they have remained open, and whether remediation is reducing risk.
A useful risk dashboard may show:
- Current exposure score and trend
- Urgent or high-priority vulnerabilities
- Vulnerabilities with known public exploits
- The devices, software, or conditions driving risk
- Vulnerability counts by severity
- Age of unresolved risk
- A timeline of newly detected and remediated vulnerabilities
- Recommendations expected to provide meaningful risk reduction
Microsoft defines exposure score as a high-level measure of vulnerability posture using severity, exploitability signals, and asset context. Microsoft also notes that the score may not move in a straight line. Newly discovered vulnerabilities can offset completed remediation during recalculation.
That is why the trend needs a story. If exposure rises, the organization should be able to identify whether a new vulnerability, a newly onboarded device, a change in asset criticality, or another factor drove the increase. If exposure falls, the team should be able to connect the improvement to specific remediation or environmental changes.
Step 1: Identify Where Security Data Lives
Visibility breaks down when the information needed to understand security is scattered across tools, teams, reports, inboxes, and individual knowledge.
Microsoft Defender may contain incidents and exposure data. Microsoft Entra may contain sign-in and authentication information. Intune may contain device and compliance data. Email protection may have its own reporting. Tickets may show completed work. A provider portal may show monitoring activity. Spreadsheets or documents may contain exceptions, owners, or plans.
The first step is not to move every data point into a new platform. It is to understand what information exists, where it comes from, who uses it, and which questions it can reliably answer.
Map the sources
Create a map of the systems that produce or store important security information. For each source, record:
- The security area it covers
- The assets, users, or systems in scope
- The types of events, metrics, or evidence it produces
- How current the information is
- Who can access it
- Whether it feeds another dashboard or report
- How long the data is retained
Common sources may include device and endpoint platforms, identity systems, email security, cloud applications, vulnerability management, security operations tools, ticketing systems, vendor portals, dashboards, and policy repositories.
A source map also exposes dependencies. If an executive dashboard relies on Microsoft data, a ticketing system, and manual provider updates, you should understand those dependencies. A broken connector or missed update can change the apparent security picture even when the underlying environment has not changed.
Identify the owners
Every important source needs an operational owner and an accountable business or security owner.
The operational owner maintains the data source, resolves collection problems, and understands technical limitations. The accountable owner ensures the information is reviewed, interpreted, and used. Internal IT, a security team, an MSP, a managed security provider, a system owner, or a shared combination may hold these roles.
Ownership should answer practical questions:
- Who notices when a device stops reporting?
- Who validates that a dashboard covers the intended users and systems?
- Who investigates unusual sign-ins?
- Who reviews unresolved vulnerabilities?
- Who explains security trends to leadership?
- Who follows up when a recommendation requires a business decision?
Access to data is not the same as responsibility for it. If everyone can see an alert but no one is expected to act, visibility has not produced accountability.
Find the blind spots
Once you map sources and owners, look for missing or unreliable information.
Blind spots may include:
- Devices that are not enrolled, onboarded, or communicating
- Guest, administrative, or service identities excluded from routine reporting
- Applications outside centralized authentication or monitoring
- Security data retained for too short a period to establish meaningful trends
- Manual reports that are difficult to reproduce
- Metrics with no agreed definition or owner
- Exceptions and accepted risks stored outside the reporting process
- Provider activity that is summarized without supporting context or outcomes
The goal is not perfect visibility into every technical event. The goal is to know where the view is incomplete so decisions are not based on false confidence.
Step 2: Separate Security Activity From Security Insight
Security teams do a lot of work thatis hard to communicate through raw data: investigating alerts, tuning policies, validating configurations, closing vulnerabilities, reviewing sign-ins, and coordinating response.
Activity proves that something happened. Insight explains why it mattered. Direction defines what happens next.
What happened?
Begin with a factual description of the event, change, or trend.
Examples include:
- Three devices stopped reporting during the month.
- MFA registration increased across employees but remained incomplete for guest users.
- A high-severity incident involved a user account and two devices.
- Exposure score increased after several new vulnerabilities were detected.
- A security policy was deployed to an additional group of users.
This layer should be accurate and scoped. Specify the time period, affected population, data source, and status when relevant.
What does it mean?
Next, interpret the information in context.
For example, three inactive devices could be retired assets, employees on leave, or a failure in security coverage. An increase in incidents could reflect greater attack activity, better detection, a configuration change, or an unusually noisy rule. A higher Secure Score could show more recommended actions completed, but it does not prove every meaningful risk was addressed.
Interpretation should consider:
- The business role and criticality of affected assets
- Whether the activity was expected
- Whether a control worked as intended
- Whether the change is temporary or persistent
- Whether other data supports the same conclusion
- What remains unknown
This is where security expertise adds value. Dashboards make patterns visible, but expertise determines which patterns deserve attention.
What should happen next?
Insight becomes useful when it drives action.
The next step may be to investigate, remediate, monitor, accept risk, request a decision, or improve the reporting itself. Whatever the response, it should identify an owner and timeframe.
A decision-ready statement might read:
"Five active devices are not reporting to endpoint protection. Two have been confirmed as retired. IT owns validation of the remaining three by Friday. Any active device that cannot be restored to coverage will be escalated for remediation."
That statement is more useful than a chart showing five inactive devices because it connects data, context, ownership, and action.
Step 3: Define What Leaders Need to See
Business leaders do not need a condensed version of every technical report. They need a stable view of the issues that affect risk, resources, priorities, and accountability.
Defining that view should be collaborative. IT and security understand the available data. Business and executive leaders understand the decisions they must make. The reporting model should connect both perspectives.
What is protected, and where is coverage incomplete?
Coverage reporting should identify the systems, users, identities, data, and services intended to be protected, then show where controls are active, unhealthy, missing, or excluded.
Useful coverage measures may include device onboarding, device health, MFA coverage, policy deployment, monitored applications, and control completion. Each metric should have a denominator. “Ninety users have MFA” is less useful than “90 of 100 in-scope users have completed registration, with 10 exceptions under review.”
What needs attention?
This view should surface the limited set of issues that require meaningful attention now. It may include active threats, urgent vulnerabilities, risky users or devices, missing controls, overdue remediation, or failed security processes.
Attention should not be determined by severity label alone. The affected asset, exploitability, existing safeguards, business impact, and urgency all matter.
What has changed?
A point-in-time posture can quickly become outdated. Leaders need to see changes that alter risk or confidence, including:
- New or removed users and devices
- New vulnerabilities or public exploits
- Policy and configuration changes
- Shifts in alert or incident patterns
- Changes in authentication use
- New applications or external access
- Progress or delays in remediation
Change reporting helps distinguish a stable program from one drifting silently between formal reviews.
What is improving?
Improvement reporting should connect completed work to measurable outcomes. Depending on the program, that may include higher control coverage, stronger authentication adoption, fewer unmanaged devices, reduced exposure, faster remediation, more consistent incident handling, or fewer overdue actions.
Not every metric should always move in one preferred direction. Better detection may temporarily increase alerts. Adding newly discovered assets may increase the number of known vulnerabilities. Reporting should explain why a number changed, rather than presenting movement as automatically positive or negative.
What needs a decision?
Security reports often identify technical findings but fail to state what leadership must decide. A separate decision view can include:
- Budget or staffing needs
- Policy approvals
- Risk exceptions
- Project sequencing
- Vendor choices
- Business process changes
- Deadlines tied to contracts, insurance, or compliance
Each decision should include the issue, available options, recommended direction, risk of delay, accountable decision-maker, and requested date. This turns reporting into governance rather than a passive status update.
Step 4: Turn Cybersecurity Visibility Into Priorities
A visible backlog is still a backlog. Next, decide what should happen first, what belongs on the roadmap, and what to monitor.
A practical prioritization model considers:
- Likely business impact
- Active threat or known exploitation
- Asset and data criticality
- Number of users or systems affected
- Existing compensating controls
- Dependencies and implementation effort
- Cost and available resources
- Contractual, regulatory, or insurance requirements
- The risk of waiting
First: Address immediate, meaningful risk
Reserve “First” work for issues where urgency and impact justify prompt action. Examples may include active incidents, exploitable weaknesses on critical systems, failed protection on important devices, exposed administrative access, or a control failure affecting a large portion of the environment.
Quick wins can also fit here when a modest change provides meaningful risk reduction. Document the reason for acting first, so urgency is based on evidence rather than the loudest alert.
Next: Plan and budget for important improvements
Some improvements matter but cannot or should not happen immediately. They may require coordination, testing, licensing, business process changes, or planned spending.
These items belong on a roadmap with an owner, business rationale, dependencies, target timing, resource estimate, and success measure. Keeping them visible prevents an important but nonurgent issue from being rediscovered during every review without progress.
Monitor: Keep lower-priority risk visible
Monitoring is a valid treatment when the current risk level does not justify immediate work. It should not mean forgetting the issue.
A monitored item should include the reason for deferral, current safeguards, owner, review date, and conditions that would change its priority. A new public exploit, business expansion, configuration change, or increase in affected assets may turn a monitored issue into a first or next priority.
This first, next, and monitor structure gives leaders a clearer picture than a long list of recommendations with identical visual weight.
Step 5: Build a Managed Rhythm for Improvement
Security visibility should support an ongoing cadence, not a one-time report. The environment changes as users join or leave, devices are replaced, applications are adopted, configurations drift, vulnerabilities are discovered, and business priorities evolve.
A useful cadence does not require leadership to review security every day. It creates predictable points for operational review, strategic planning, and follow-through.
Monthly operational review
A monthly review can focus on:
- Changes in device, identity, and control coverage
- Open incidents and important alert trends
- New or aging vulnerabilities
- Remediation completed during the period
- Overdue actions and blockers
- Meaningful changes in posture or exposure
- Client or leadership actions still required
The output should be updated priorities, assigned follow-up, and a record of material decisions. The meeting should not recite every dashboard tile.
Quarterly security planning
A quarterly review can step back from day-to-day activity and examine:
- Broader posture and risk trends
- Recurring control gaps or operational problems
- Progress against the security roadmap
- Budget, policy, vendor, and project decisions
- Changes in the business or threat environment
- Priorities for the next quarter
This is also the appropriate level for leadership to confirm whether security work remains aligned with business goals and risk tolerance.
Ongoing follow-through
Between review meetings, owners should update remediation status, document decisions, resolve blockers, and maintain the information that feeds the next report.
The value of the cadence depends on consistency. If the same unresolved issue appears every month with no owner, deadline, or decision, the organization has visibility but not management.
Organizations that need help maintaining the broader roadmap, executive reporting, and decision process may benefit from ongoing security leadership. DotStar Security Partner provides planning, reporting, security reviews, and access to professionals across security strategy, engineering, architecture, reporting, and product development. It includes many vCISO functions while extending access beyond one role or specialty.
What Security Scores and Dashboards Cannot Tell You Alone?
Dashboards make security easier to understand, but no chart should be treated as the complete truth about an organization’s risk.
Common limitations include:
A metric only describes its defined scope
A device health chart cannot describe machines that have never been enrolled or discovered. An MFA percentage may exclude certain identities or may measure registration rather than actual use. An incident dashboard reflects the data sources and detections feeding it.
Every important metric should have a clear definition, population, timeframe, and source.
A score compresses many factors into one number
Secure Score and exposure score are useful summaries, but they answer different questions and are calculated independently. A higher Secure Score generally reflects more completed recommended actions. A lower exposure score generally reflects lower vulnerability exposure across assessed devices.
Neither number replaces a review of critical assets, business impact, exceptions, control effectiveness, and unresolved decisions.
A trend needs an explanation
A line moving up or down tells you that something changed. It does not tell you why. Changes in scope, newly discovered assets, new vulnerabilities, altered calculation methods, or completed remediation can all affect a trend.
The report should connect major changes to events or actions whenever possible.
Fast is not always effective
Shorter resolution times can be valuable, but evaluate speed alongside severity, investigation quality, classification, containment, required client action, and recurrence. A provider that closes alerts quickly without explaining the outcome may improve a metric without improving the business’s understanding.
Visibility is not the same as security
Seeing a gap does not close it. Seeing a recommendation does not implement it. Seeing an incident does not resolve it.
Visibility supports stronger security when the organization has people and processes to interpret the information, make decisions, complete work, verify outcomes, and revisit priorities.
How Managed Security Helps Close the Visibility Gap
The security visibility gap often exists because the work, data, and decisions are separated. Tools collect signals. IT teams handle operational needs. Security specialists investigate issues. Providers send reports. Leaders approve resources. Without a managed process connecting those roles, each participant may see only part of the picture.
Managed security can close the gap by combining protection, monitoring, interpretation, reporting, recommendations, ownership, and recurring review.
The outcome should not be more reports. It should be a clearer security program.
When Business Protection fits
DotStar's Business Protection is designed for organizations that want stronger managed protection across their Microsoft environment and meaningful visibility into security performance.
The service brings endpoint protection, email protection, identity protection, threat monitoring, posture metrics, security automation, reporting, and expert guidance into a coordinated program. Clients can access dashboard views across:
- Machines and device health
- Users, MFA coverage, and authentication methods
- Sign-in activity, applications, locations, devices, and timing
- Incidents, classifications, severity, handling, and resolution
- Microsoft 365 cloud posture, controls, and Secure Score trends
- Vulnerabilities, public exploits, exposure trends, risk drivers, and remediation
That visibility helps replace “security is being handled” with a stronger answer: what is being managed, what the data shows, what's changed, and what needs attention next.
If your organization uses Microsoft 365 but does not yet have a reliable baseline, a Microsoft 365 Assessment can identify configuration gaps, underused capabilities, and prioritized opportunities before broader implementation or managed protection begins. For a deeper implementation guide, see How to Implement Microsoft Security in 2026.
When Security Partner adds value
Some organizations already have technical security tools or providers but still lack ongoing leadership. Reports arrive, yet no one maintains the roadmap, translates technical findings for executives, coordinates specialists, or keeps long-term priorities moving.
Security Partner fits that gap. It provides ongoing leadership, planning, reporting, security reviews, vendor and project guidance, and access to a wider security team as needs change.
Business Protection and Security Partner solve related but different problems:
| Need | Natural fit |
| Managed protection and visible reporting across a Microsoft security environment | Business Protection |
| Ongoing security leadership, planning, executive reporting, and roadmap management | Security Partner |
| A baseline view of current Microsoft security configurations before making changes | Microsoft 365 Assessment |
An organization may need one of these services or use them together as its security program matures.