Security is a top priority for every business and we can never have enough of it, right? But at what point does it become too much to administer and prioritize security threats? I’m excited to tell you about a newly announced offering called Azure Secure Score which is part of the Azure Security Center.

If you’re unfamiliar, the Azure Security Center is a centralized place where you can get security recommendations based on the workloads you’ve deployed. In September at Ignite, Microsoft announced Secure Score as a security analytics tool that provides visibility of your organization’s security posture, as well as help you understand how secure your workloads are by assigning them a score.

The new Secure Score helps you prioritize and triage your response to security recommendations. It takes into consideration the severity and impact of the recommendation and based on that info it assigns a numerical value to show how fixing the recommendation can improve your security posture.

Once you implement a recommendation, the score and the overall Secure Score updates.

The main goals of Secure Score are:

• To provide the capabilities that allow you to visualize the security posture.
• Quickly triage and make suggestions to provide impactful actions that increase your security posture.
• Measures the workload of the security over time.

So, how does Azure Security Center and Secure Score work?

• Azure Security Center constantly reviews your active recommendations and calculates your Secure Score based on these.
• The score of a recommendation is derived from its severity and security best practices that will affect your workload security over time.
• It looks at your security and where you sit over a period. It’s not an immediate result and it won’t immediately change but it’s going to help you build up your score as you implement any recommendations and then you can silence them.
• The Secure Score is calculated based on the ratio between your healthy resources and your total resources. If the number of healthy resources is equal to your total resources, you get the highest score value.
• The overall score is an accumulation of all your recommendations. You can view your overall Secure Score across your subscriptions or management groups depending on the scope you select. The score will also vary based on the subscriptions selected and the active recommendations on them.

Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time to do the remediation, whether it be patching machines or closing ports or shutting off services. There are so many remedies offered that will make you more secure down the road. With this offering, you get a ‘scorecard’ for yourself and a look at what’s most imperative to implement first.

Be sure to check out the Azure Security Center. There are a lot of free options there as well as options to add additional services at a cost.