The biggest worries for global organizations are the things they are least prepared for. According to consultancy PwC’s 2025 Global Digital Trust Insights, only 2% of tech executives they surveyed had implemented cyber resilience across their organizations, while at the same time, 66% of tech leaders cite cyber risk as the top area for mitigation.
For organizations depending on Microsoft 365, adopting a strong Microsoft cyber resilience strategy builds layers of resilience directly into your tenant – letting you withstand attacks when they happen.
This article covers:
Cyber resilience in Microsoft 365 means preparing for missteps, not just attacks. This article lays out how to strengthen your tenant across key layers—identity, configuration, and collaboration—so your team can detect failures early, recover quickly, and keep operations moving. It covers practical strategies like enforcing least privilege, catching policy violations in real time, and rolling back risky changes before they spread. For IT and security leaders navigating privilege sprawl, misconfigurations, and Copilot exposure, this is a clear framework for building tenant-wide resilience before the next incident tests it.
Microsoft 365 isn’t just an app. It’s a prime target for cybercriminals. The average Microsoft 365 tenant contains 58% of an organization’s sensitive cloud data and, arguably, houses the most powerful privileged accounts a business has.
Acknowledging gaps in their cyber resilience preparedness, CISO involvement, regulatory compliance, and in measuring cyber risk, enterprises are flying blind, meaning that cyber resilience needs to be atop the C-suite’s list for strategic investment. For Microsoft 365 specifically, organizations face a rapidly evolving and expanding attack surface, a dangerous lack of visibility, potential for misconfiguration and error, a constant barrage of Microsoft-specific changes, among other challenges. For example, the 2024 Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report states that 67% of companies reporting repeated cyber attacks in the past year, it’s a question of when and how often – not if – an enterprise will fall victim to a breach or find their M365 cyber resilience lacking.
According to the 2025 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report, a record-breaking 1,360 security vulnerabilities were experienced across its products, up 11% from the previous reported high in 2022. While the overall number of critical vulnerabilities is declining, the focus is shifting towards identity protection due to the prevalence of remote code execution (RCE) and elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities, which are primary targets for attackers.
Industry surveys have consistently revealed that Microsoft 365 tenants face a constant barrage of attacks.
Your tenant will be breached. Cyber resilience techniques for Microsoft help you withstand attacks and recover more quickly.
NIST defines cyber resilience as:
“The ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.”
Let’s break this down into its four constituent parts and look at what this may involve for Microsoft 365.
Whereas traditional security builds defenses based on an existing understanding of best practices, cyber resilience implores security teams to look ahead and anticipate emerging threats and trends.
No one can predict the future, but you can ensure you partner with vendors and service providers who react quickly to the threat landscape. And you can implement an internal process to review emerging threats frequently and adapt your internal standards appropriately.
Implementing this process is a strong starting point. But it should also include a practical way to make changes quickly. For example, if you identify a requirement that your existing toolset cannot deliver, you will be able to adapt faster if you have an extensible platform.
It’s obvious that every organization should implement strong access-level security for its tenants, such as email filtering, a zero-trust framework for authentication, and cloud access control.
However, withstanding an attack means implementing security measures to minimize the impact when someone successfully outwits or bypasses these controls.
To minimize the impact when your tenant is breached, you will want to make it as difficult as possible for cybercriminals to move laterally, elevate their privileges, persist in your tenant, and reach their final objective.
For the full list of best practices to withstand a tenant attack, access the full Microsoft 365 Cyber Resilience guide.
There are now over 10,000 unique policy elements across Microsoft 365’s many configuration types, with many of these designed to have multiple variations (e.g., multiple user groups or conditional access policies).
This means the day-to-day operation of a Microsoft 365 tenant may rely on hundreds of thousands (or in some cases millions) of unique configurations.
With this complexity, it is now critical that organizations keep their Microsoft 365 tenant configurations backed up, ready to be restored in the event of a disaster.
The final element in the NIST definition of cyber resilience is the ability to adapt and continuously improve your tenant security based on what you learn from past incidents. To do this, it is critical that you work with extensible platforms that allow you to adapt them to your unique requirements.
Dive deeper into best practices you can implement today to be more resilient with our complete guide: Microsoft 365 Cyber Resilience Maturity Model.
Without a clear plan, attackers can spread laterally, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate data before you even detect them. Detect intrusions early, contain threats, and recover before attackers cause serious damage by using this maturity model framework.
At level 1 of the maturity model, the goal is to safeguard Microsoft 365 tenant cyber resilience and reduce the likelihood of initial compromise in your tenant. Implementing the controls associated with level 1 will help you enforce strong user access, email filtering, and data access controls for your tenant—all things that drive down the risk of an initial breach.
At level two, you’re aiming to reduce the impact of compromise once someone has accessed your tenant. The controls here include backing up your configurations, deploying secure configurations, detecting configuration drift, enforcing configuration change management, and detecting and testing new Microsoft updates before they’re rolled out.
With your configurations now tamper-proof, Level 3 looks to remove common escalation vectors and pathways that cybercriminals love to exploit. Controls for level 3 include:
By the time you come to Level 4, you have put layers of resilience into your tenant to slow attackers down to a crawl. The next step is to implement governance and automation to keep your attack surface lean and your response time fast.
This final level involves implementing sprawl and lifecycle management, user access reviews, enhanced audit and reporting, secure task management, and rapid extensibility.
Many of the topics we’ve covered in the maturity model are the same as those that are the most common issues that stand between you and Microsoft 365 cyber resilience.
Many organizations fail to configure their key security features, leaving defaults in place. Or human error leads to misconfigurations. Or, yet again, a configuration tampering attack leaves you exposed. And further still, Microsoft could have made changes you don’t know about that altered your configurations or made existing configurations not work properly anymore. Whatever the configuration issue – any of these can increase your exposure to compromise.
Whether it’s weak credential enforcement, no MFA enforcement, overuse of global admin accounts, too much read-write privilege for Entra apps, or insufficient monitoring of privileged accounts, there are all manner of ways for sensitive data to leak out or bad actors to get in and gain unauthorized access to the M365 crown jewels and do real damage.
Microsoft 365’s default email security is not enough to protect enterprises against the aggressive, creative, and advanced attempts to break through via phishing, malware, and other forms of social engineering. Introducing advanced anti-phishing policies and tuning Safe Links and Safe Attachments features as well as implementing internal training to help reduce the risk that your people are your weakest link.
Many enterprises assume incorrectly that their tenant configurations are backed up by Microsoft and will be ready to restore. While Microsoft provides data availability, there is no native solution for long-term backup, and this can lead to losses in productivity, critical data, regulatory hassles, financial consequences and more.
Organizations often don’t deploy native Microsoft tools like Microsoft Defender, let alone adopt tools that would improve visibility and help detect problems before they become problems. This leads to delayed incident response and potential for much further-reaching business consequences.
Enterprises cannot improve if they don’t continuously review their security posture and performance – this is ongoing in the same way that vulnerabilities are not static. The complexity of M365 makes it impossible to do this kind of systematic review and audit manually and as regularly as would be recommended. And as such, you will miss new vulnerabilities, configuration and policy drift, and ultimately, a lot of red flags. Conducting regular Microsoft Secure Score reviews and running risk assessments and security audits can help you head off future problems and secure cyber resilience for your organization.
The Cyber Resilience Maturity Model for Microsoft 365 covers each level of the maturity model in-depth, including recommendations and best practices from Microsoft experts to build cyber resilience into your day-to-day operations.
A NIST-aligned framework to help organizations anticipate threats, minimize risks, recover swiftly, and continuously strengthen Microsoft 365 security. Download the full checklist today to build resilience and stay protected.
To get inside your tenant, attackers use all kinds of tactics—some new, some old. Stay up to date on the latest attack tactics from cybercriminals to strengthen your organization’s defenses against evolving threats.
See how in the Anatomy of a Microsoft 365 Attack.
It takes attackers just 16 hours to reach your directory.
And, once inside your tenant, attackers will find and hijack high-privilege accounts. Counteract these attacks by identifying accounts with excessive permissions and reducing exposure with the Admin Permissions Scanner for Microsoft 365.
With CoreView, you get the tools you need for true cyber resilience for your Microsoft tenant. Our rapid response and secure automation tools make tenant protection more than just a preventative measure:
See how your peers use CoreView to build resilience in Microsoft 365. Or, schedule a demo to dive deeper into our cyber resilience capabilities.
