One of the big challenges I have found with securing a Microsoft 365 environment is determining and setting best practices settings for the environment. Recommendations can be found in many different locations from many different sources. I have always done my best to pull all these together and convert them into a single place that I can apply.
With that in mind I am happy to announce the availability of a new CIAOPS Best Practices repository for Microsoft 365here:
https://github.com/directorcia/bp/tree/main
The aim is for it to be the one place you can go that centralizes all the best practice information, security and otherwise, for Microsoft 365.
Let me give you an example of the benefits of this. In the repo you’ll find the following JSON file for an Entra ID authorization policy:
https://github.com/directorcia/bp/blob/main/EntraID/authorization.json
The idea is that you can use a script like I just uploaded:
https://github.com/directorcia/Office365/blob/master/graph-idauthpolicy-get.ps1
To read these settings and compare them to your own environment.
You can see the results above when you run this script. The items that are in red do not match the best practice settings that are in repo.
Not only can you use the repo to compare settings but you can also use it to apply settings. Again, you’d just read the JSON setting in the repo and apply that to your environment. Thus, you could take the Entra ID authorization policy JSON and use a script to actually apply, or write, those settings to your environment. CIAOPS Patron subscribers will have access to the scripts that I develop that will do both the reading and setting of these parameters. Thus, if you don’t to actually write the code to do all this then become a CIAOPS Patron subscriber.
Having these settings available publicly also means people can examine and comment on them and help develop what is best practices in the Microsoft 365 environment. Remember, that best practices are not absolute, they are what works best for the majority of people. You may want to take these as a base and modify them to suit your needs. The benefits of using Github is that is easy to achieve. Thus, you could create your own repo, based on mine, and that as you base for your environment.
The repo also contains links to best practices I have found like this :
https://github.com/directorcia/bp/blob/main/best-practices.txt
That you can also use. Again, the idea is to bring all these resources for Microsoft 365 into a single location.
This best practices repo is far from complete but I wanted to get it out there so people can provide me feedback and we can all build this out to make all our lives easier. Going forward, I plan to spend time developing the repo wiki to provide documentation for all this. However, feel free to take a look at what is there and provide any suggestions for improvement or addition. I’m all ears.
CIAOPS 