2025 introduced new risks in Microsoft 365, particularly with the proliferation of Copilot, as well as wider awareness of existing risks posed by oversharing and privilege sprawl, configuration management gaps, and the critical nature of tenant resilience and security. CoreView’s experts weigh in, offering hard-earned lessons, practical solutions, and insights from 2025 that will shape 2026 and beyond.
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2025 was a watershed year for Microsoft 365 management and governance. CoreView’s experts witnessed the exposure of serious configuration management gaps, persistent struggles with oversharing (especially in Entra and SharePoint), and disruption from unchecked AI use, including Copilot and custom agent proliferation.
The year also saw growing awareness of tenant resilience, as organizations realized their backup strategies often left their critical configurations unprotected. With cyberattacks and outages increasing, continuous configuration monitoring, Zero Trust enforcement, and broad engagement in security are now mainstream concerns for the year ahead.
IT leaders depend on Microsoft’s ever-expanding suite of tools to manage sprawling digital workplaces, but 2025 in particular revealed the limitations of the all-in-one Microsoft 365 approach. Despite its aspiration to be a comprehensive solution for enterprise productivity and security, Microsoft 365 remains incomplete, and as a result, customers grappled with systemic gaps in configuration management, unprecedented challenges with least privilege management and the problem of oversharing, and the swift rise of AI-driven features and agents.
CoreView’s expert team, in daily collaboration with global enterprises, saw firsthand how organizations adapted, struggled, and sometimes failed to secure their environments against new and familiar threats. Drawing from this insight into customer deployments and incidents, here is an in-depth look at what defined 2025 in Microsoft 365 – and what it means for the journey ahead.
A clear challenge for Microsoft 365 users in 2025 was the profound lack of visibility, control, and automation in Microsoft 365 tenant configuration management.
Both through customer conversations and the 2025 CoreView State of Microsoft 365 Security report, it became clear that at least half of all enterprises believed that Microsoft backs up their tenant configurations (which is false), and by extension, had no idea that they would be unable to easily restore their tenant configurations in the event of a disaster.
Most organizations continued to assume that their backup and restore strategies covered every aspect of tenant resilience. This misconception persisted even after outages and incidents revealed stark gaps. Many IT teams believed that third-party data backup solutions or Microsoft’s native offerings had them fully protected, only to discover that tenant configuration, policies, permissions, and access controls were excluded.
This gap led to two sweeping developments:
The practical reality is that configuration management has shifted from an advanced requirement to a baseline necessity. Enterprises have begun to see that without automation, visibility, and rapid restore capabilities, business continuity and security goals are undermined.
Across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, organizations continued to struggle with configuration-related challenges. Whether through accidental manual misconfigurations, especially around permissions, conditional access, or malicious configuration tampering (the CoreView 2025 M365 security report cited a near 80% increase in configuration tampering since 2023), misconfigurations are a persistent and pernicious problem that – without the right tooling and visibility – can remain invisible indefinitely, until there’s a problem. And these configuration problems can be crippling.
At the same time, the overprivilege problem has grown as well, despite a growing awareness of the underlying security vulnerabilities this creates. Microsoft makes it very easy to share and overshare without easy ways to rescind unnecessary or outdated permissions or even to see where these least privilege violations exist. CoreView’s reporting found that almost two-thirds of enterprises fail to implement least privilege effectively – and this trend continued throughout 2025.
Some important points to note:
As a result, permission sprawl and oversharing are not simply technical problems – they are fundamental, and indeed existential, governance failures exposing enterprises to data leakage, regulatory fines, and lost trust.
If 2024 was the year of generative AI hype, 2025 was the year that operational reality caught up dramatically. The rapid rollout of Copilot, Copilot Studio, and the proliferation of custom AI agents disrupted existing security models nearly overnight.
2025 saw the risks of tenant-level outages and misconfigurations come painfully into focus, driven by newsworthy cyberattacks, accidental configuration changes, and regulatory scrutiny. State and local U.S. sectors, as well as global enterprises, suffered downtime when critical configurations went missing or were corrupted.
While these four key takeaways dominated the headlines, several additional trends and findings deserve special mention:
Most organizations “pay lip service” to least privilege and Zero Trust principles. Compliance frameworks are tightening, but implementation lags. Many teams lack the tools to both enforce and evidence adherence. As AI and delegated identities expand, enforcing Zero Trust at every layer (including non-human actors) becomes vital.
Continuous configuration monitoring and remediation emerged as near-mainstream requirements. The market saw increased deployment of solutions for real-time drift detection and automated rollback, yet building and maintaining these systems remains challenging, especially when Microsoft’s native offerings are far from comprehensive and most enterprises need to rely on third-party tools.
Virtual tenant model and granular delegation remain CoreView’s differentiators. The ability to assign precise roles, restrict access, and automate governance across hybrid and multi-tenant environments is now a decisive factor for large enterprises.
Organizations are now far more rigorous when considering third-party platforms for Microsoft 365. Supply chain attacks, regulatory demands, and unmet promises from Microsoft’s roadmap mean that customers demand high standards—ISO 27001, SOC 2, and practical value. CoreView’s adherence to standards and ability to rapidly deliver solutions earned increasing market trust during 2025 and delivered key functionality for customers, especially where Microsoft could not.
2025 was a pivotal year that redefined standards for Microsoft 365 management, governance, and security. The exposure of configuration gaps, persistent oversharing, the rise of AI-powered agents, and a new focus on tenant resilience sets up new awareness for how enterprises approach cyber resilience and security and reprioritizes innovation and investment in terms of securing business continuity.
As organizations look to 2026, one lesson stands out: proactive governance, supported by automation and collaboration, is now essential for success in a rapidly evolving digital workplace.
Are you ready for the future of Microsoft 365 management? Reach out to CoreView to see how next-generation tools can empower your team and safeguard your business.
