Microsoft 365 Configuration Drift Tools in 2026: What Enterprises Need

Microsoft 365 configuration drift doesn’t announce itself – it quietly spreads across Entra, Intune, Exchange, Teams, SharePoint/OneDrive, Purview, and Defender until an audit, outage, or incident forces you to explain what changed. This article will help you understand the limits of Microsoft’s supports for drift management and what your third-party options are.

Inside this article

• Why Microsoft 365 configuration drift matters in 2026  ‍
• Key use cases for Microsoft 365 drift management  ‍
• What to look for in configuration drift management tools  ‍
• Roundup of the top M365 drift management tools in 2026  ‍
• CoreView: Setting a new standard for configuration drift management  

Executive summary

Microsoft 365 (M365) tenant configuration is the slow and steady accumulation of small edits across every aspect of the M365 environment – often made under time pressure, across many admin portals. M365 doesn’t provide a single consolidated view of what changed across its interconnected services, leaving many organizations to parse logs or build scripts to fill the gap. This article explains key drift and tampering use cases, what to look for in drift management tools, where Microsoft-native approaches fit (and where they don’t), and how to choose tooling that supports audits, investigations, and recovery.

Why Microsoft 365 configuration drift matters in 2026

Most organizations harden M365 to a known-good state. Then day-to-day operations begin: requests come in, exceptions pile up, and admins make “small tweaks” that feel harmless at the time. Over weeks and months, these edits accumulate into drift – settings that no longer match what was approved and can put the company and its M365 tenant at risk of compromise.

So how do you know when a drift has happened? The answer is you don’t, because Microsoft doesn’t tell you. The reason for this is structural. M365 isn’t one product. It’s a collection of interconnected services, each with their own controls and admin experiences. There are no consolidated tool or tools you can use in M365 that span the 60-plus applications and services.

This matters because ensuring your M365 configurations remain constant is crucial to maintaining your security posture. If an identity policy is weakened, an external sharing control is loosened, or a privileged pathway quietly expands, your defenses can change without an obvious alert – and without an easy way to prove what changed, when, and why.

Key use cases for Microsoft 365 drift management

Why you need specific drift management tools is best understood by where they fit operationally – whether you need posture visibility, risk prioritization, access governance, or threat detection around Microsoft 365.

1) Baseline alignment (CIS plus your exceptions)

Any drift management program starts with “what good looks like.” Depending on what framework(s) your organization is using, there could be hundreds of benchmark recommendations you need to work to. CIS for examples has 140 benchmark recommendations. This takes time, but it is critical to being able to monitor drift.

Understanding what good looks like for an M365 tenant perspective provides positive practical outcomes:

• A clear baseline across identity, endpoint, collaboration, and data controls
• Exception handling that’s explicit, owned, and time-bound.
• Reduced risk of “we hardened it once, so we’re fine.”

In a recent interview, an animal health care company highlighted the difficulty of managing an effective configurations baseline within M365, and where other organizations need to focus their attention. The problem the company was facing wasn’t a lack of hardening intent, it was the difficulty of proving “approved state” in a way that maps to compliance reality. The gap between a generic drift view and an audit-ready narrative is hard to do cleanly when reporting is clunky or incomplete.

2) Forensics-grade change understanding (before/after)

When drift becomes suspicious – or when an outage hits – you need to know more than “something changed.” You need the specific delta. You want the before and after snapshots so that you can understand exactly what’s happened. This way you can ensure that you have:

• Faster investigations and better evidence quality.
• Clearer rollback decisions for high-impact settings.
• Reduced “portal hopping” across Entra, Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and Purview.

A home care company describes drift as a day-to-day operational risk: when Microsoft 365 configuration changes aren’t consistently backed up and tracked. The IT team  found this was especially challenging in identity and access management, where untracked changes can create identity weakening, increased downtime, and audit gaps. In business terms, that translates into greater exposure to compliance failure and continuity risk when critical controls drift.

3) Multi-tenant governance

Drift is hard enough to manage in one tenant. But you may need consistent posture across regions, mergers, business units, or regulated subdivisions. If you’re managing 8-9 different tenants it becomes incredibly complex, because you’re enforcing the same baselines and exceptions over different configurations, admin models, and change cadences– this means visibility, consistency, and attribution of “who changed what where” can quickly break down without centralized governance.

Being able to effectively manage across multiple tenants gives you:

• The ability to identify which tenant diverged from the baseline and why.
• Standardized governance reporting across tenants.
• Reduced duplication of effort and more consistent enforcement.

This exact challenge was highlighted to us by a recruitment consultancy group. The group had brought together a number of companies through M&A and needed to have both tenant visibility and a repeatable way to answer: How different are these tenants? Which differences are acceptable? Which ones are risky? They also required practical governance requirement: keeping synchronization and configuration data inside customer-controlled workflows (they discussed integration with their own Azure DevOps) to align with internal controls and audit expectations. Without this kind of standardization, multi-tenant governance devolves into manual assessment and one-off fixes, which become slow to execute, hard to repeat, and prone to inconsistency.

4) Tampering detection as a persistence control

Drift isn’t always accidental. Tampering is a direct security concern because it can be used by an attacker to maintain M365 access even after a security event has seemingly been remediated. Tampering with configuration can help ensure that they maintain a a back door for future incursions. If you can detect tampering you can:

• Highlight changes that weaken controls (identity, sharing, privilege, auditing).
• Shorten time to containment by surfacing the highest-impact deltas.
• Support recovery by restoring known-good configuration quickly after compromise.

An energy company outlined to us how drift can be the mechanism by which controls get weakened and attackers persist. Drift can come from multiple sources – admins, Microsoft-driven updates, and malicious actors. What mattered operationally for them was they had the ability to combine fast detection with historical comparison – a workflow to see what changed relative to a prior known-good state or baseline, then decide whether and how to roll back.

If critical identity controls drift, the organization can face immediate security exposure and a major resilience gap – especially if they lack a reliable way to recover configuration after destructive change. Drift management becomes a persistence countermeasure when it can surface high-impact control degradation quickly enough to shorten time-to-containment and support recovery.

What to look for in configuration drift management tools

This checklist provides you with a list of question to ask that will help you to evaluate drift management tools without getting distracted by dashboards and marketing speak.

Comprehensive coverage (depth, not just breadth)

• Does the tool cover Entra ID, Intune, Exchange, Teams, SharePoint/OneDrive, Purview, and Defender?
• Does it capture detailed values (policy conditions, exclusions, role scopes), or only basic “on/off” states?
• Can it show the exact setting that changed and the before/after values?
• When drift happens, can it prove who changed what (audit trail)?

Multi-tenant and cross-environment visibility

• Can you compare tenants against a consistent baseline?
• Can you standardize policies and governance across tenants?
• Can you segment visibility by admin team (identity vs. messaging vs. collaboration)?

Real-time or automated drift detection (be honest about cadence)

• Is detection based on scheduled snapshots (hourly/daily), event logs, or both?
• Are alerting expectations clear, especially for audit-log latency and gaps?
• Can responders trust the signal enough to act during incidents?
• Can it compare against industry/security baselines (e.g., CIS/benchmarks) vs just “our own” baseline?

Policy enforcement and approvals

• Can the tool prevent risky changes through approval workflows?
• Can you apply “guardrails” to high-impact settings (Conditional Access, sharing policies, privileged roles)?
• Does it support role-based access control (RBAC) for distributed admin teams?

Guided remediation and rollback readiness

• Does every drift finding map to an action (auto-remediate, ticket-and-approve, monitor-only)?
• Can the tool support safe rollback with validation checks?
• Does it help you restore configuration after incidents, mistakes, or compromise?
• How long is the configuration history/retention?

Roundup of top M365 Drift Management tools in 2026

Having looked at why drift management is important, we need to look at the different tools and tool types that are available to you achieve your goals.

Microsoft tools (logs, scripting, and Desired State Configuration)

If you’re going to work with Microsoft tooling you will need to create your own scripts, but for most organizations doing this on an ongoing basis is unachievable, certainly at scale. On top of this the “build” route can become brittle as Microsoft 365 changes under you.

So Microsoft tools come with a caveat: they are best used when you have strong PowerShell maturity, you’re prepared to build and maintain custom logic, and you can accept fragmented visibility and operational overhead.

Microsoft 365 Desired State Configuration (DSC)

What it is: An open-source, PowerShell-based desired-state configuration framework for Microsoft 365. You export tenant configuration into code (MOF/PS data), store it (Git), and compare/apply to converge back to the desired state.

Strengths (for “drift-like” needs)

• True desired-state model (when built well): Lets you define “this is the approved configuration,” then detect deviation by comparing exported state to the repo.
• Engineering-friendly and auditable: Works cleanly with Git, PR approvals, CI/CD, and produces an artifact trail that supports change control.
• Automation leverage: If you invest in pipelines, you can move from “detect drift” to “enforce desired state” (auto-remediate or gated remediation).
• Customizable coverage via resources/modules: You can target exactly what matters to your org (security baselines + business-specific settings).

Weaknesses/limits

• Not turnkey drift management: You must assemble the whole toolchain – auth, export cadence, comparisons, alerting, remediation gating, secrets, pipelines, and reporting.
• Continuous monitoring UX is usually DIY: Out-of-the-box, it’s not a “live dashboard and workflows” product; you build the monitoring/triage experience yourself (or bolt on other tooling).
• Multi-tenant governance is hard at scale: Running it across many tenants means engineering for segmentation, per-tenant exceptions, role separation, and safe remediation – again, mostly DIY.
• Forensics-grade “before/after” history is not automatic: You can get history via Git commits and exports, but “who changed what in the service” and “what exactly changed at time X” often requires integrating audit logs and building richer state capture.
• Operational fragility risk: Dependency on changing APIs/modules, auth patterns, throttling, and resource drift coverage variability can create maintenance overhead.

Best-fit: Best when you have DevOps maturity and want a configuration-as-code discipline for Microsoft 365 – where drift detection is a byproduct of a broader “policy as code and change control” program.

Microsoft BSM (brief-supplied: early coverage)

What it is: A Microsoft-native baseline/security management capability intended to assess/enforce a defined set of security-relevant configuration checks. Today it appears narrow in scope (roughly “~20 configs”), suggesting an early-stage rollout focused on a small set of high-impact controls.

Strengths (for “drift-like” needs)

• Microsoft-native baseline direction: Designed to make “are we aligned to Microsoft’s recommended baseline?” easier than assembling scripts and reports.
• Simple, security-oriented posture checks: Strong when you only need monitoring against a small set of critical baseline items (fast time-to-value).
• Likely to improve over time: Good “directionally correct” approach – worth tracking as Microsoft expands the configuration surface area.

Weaknesses/limits

• Limited configuration surface area (today): With a small number of checks, it can’t represent a full drift program across Entra/Exchange/SharePoint/Teams/Power Platform, etc.
• Not the same as broad desired-state management: Baseline checking does not equal comprehensive “desired vs actual” across hundreds of settings with organization-specific standards.
• Exception handling and enterprise governance may be immature: Early-stage tools often lack nuanced workflows for approved deviations, multi-tenant segmentation, and audit-ready reporting at scale.
• Forensics-grade state history is not the core focus: Baseline tools typically report “pass/fail and current state,” but don’t inherently provide deep historical state/versioning across the tenant.

Best fit: Best as an early baseline validator for a limited set of Microsoft-recommended controls – useful for quick posture wins, but not a replacement for a comprehensive drift management program while coverage remains narrow.

Secure Score

What is it? Microsoft Secure Score is a built-in security posture scoring and recommendations feature in the Microsoft security portals (e.g., Microsoft Defender) that measures how well your Microsoft 365 environment aligns to Microsoft-recommended security controls and configurations, and tracks improvement over time.

Strengths (for M365 posture & drift-adjacent work)

• Fast posture signal: Gives a quick, understandable measure of “are we getting safer over time?”
• Actionable recommendations list: Connects score impact to specific control recommendations and guidance.
• Native and low friction: No extra tooling to deploy; works well as a baseline conversation starter with stakeholders.
• Trend tracking: Useful for showing progress month-over-month and prioritizing high-impact improvements.

Weaknesses / limits (for configuration drift management)

• Not drift management by design: It’s a posture score, not a system for baseline enforcement, exceptions, or continuous state assurance.
• Limited “why/when/who” depth: Often lacks forensics-grade, before/after configuration diffs and rich change context.
• Broad guidance vs. operational control: Great for “what to improve,” weaker for “keep it this way” across complex, multi-team environments.
• Score optimization risk: Teams can chase points instead of focusing on the controls that matter most for their threat model and operating constraints.

Best fit: Organizations that want a native, executive-friendly way to prioritize and track Microsoft 365 security hardening – using Secure Score as the front door to posture improvement and as a reporting mechanism – while relying on other processes/tools for continuous configuration drift detection, exception handling, and enforcement at scale.

Third-party tools

Adaptive Shield (CrowdStrike)

What it is: SSPM platform (now under CrowdStrike) oriented around SaaS posture management, SaaS security controls, and misconfiguration visibility.

Strengths (for M365 drift)

• Good at turning M365 posture into actionable security findings with prioritization.
• Helps track policy compliance drift over time (pass/fail movement against recommended settings).
• Often effective for security teams who need quick, repeatable posture reporting.

Weaknesses/limits (for M365 drift)

• Usually not a full desired-state configuration management solution (define granular desired config, diff continuously, remediate safely).
• Limited forensics-grade “before/after” across broad M365 configuration surfaces.
• Typically lacks tenant config backup/restore workflows.
• Multi-tenant standardization/segmentation for drift programs can be less central than in M365-specialist platforms.

Best fit: Organizations prioritizing broad SaaS posture visibility and policy-based checks across Microsoft 365 plus other SaaS platforms, where the main goal is to reduce misconfiguration risk fast and operationalize remediation through tickets/playbooks, not to run an M365-native, forensics-grade configuration history/rollback program.

AppOmni  

What it is: SSPM focused on SaaS posture, exposure management, and control validation across major SaaS apps (including Microsoft 365).

Strengths (for M365 drift)

• Strong on SaaS posture and access risk that can function as “drift signals” (new risky grants, insecure posture conditions).
• Can help identify misconfigurations and exposure pathways introduced by admin activity or app changes.
• Useful for “are we still aligned to policy intent?” checks, especially when policies are security-driven.

Weaknesses/limits (for M365 drift)

• Drift coverage often maps to controls rather than broad, granular M365 configuration diffing across workloads.
• Limited native concept of tenant configuration state versioning (beyond issue timelines) compared to drift-first tools.
• Config restore/rewind for M365 settings is typically out of scope.
• May under-serve deep operational drift needs (e.g., sustained config hygiene across Exchange/Teams admin surfaces).

Best fit: Security teams that want SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) across multiple SaaS apps (including Microsoft 365) to quickly spot misconfigurations and risky exposures, and route findings into existing SecOps workflows – especially where M365 drift is treated as posture findings rather than deep, baseline-versioned configuration management.  

CoreView

What it is: A SaaS platform purpose-built to master enterprise level Microsoft 365 complexity and build tenant resilience across large/complex environments (multi-tenant, hybrid, M&A). CoreView’s model is “visibility → secure baseline → detect drift → rewind/restore → segment admin rights → automate governance” in one system.

Strengths (for “drift-like” needs)

• Deep M365 drift coverage (state-aware): Detects misconfigurations and drift across 8000+ configuration details, with CIS & ASD baselines and 85+ policy packs to standardize “desired state.”
• Configuration backup and restore (“rewind”): Designed for tenant configuration state recovery – restoring configuration after an incident or unwanted change (not just alerting on findings).
• Multi-tenant and hybrid visibility: Built to manage multiple M365 tenants and integrate with onprem AD/Exchange, enabling consistent posture across fragmented estates.
• Operational UX for continuous monitoring: Unified dashboards and 130+ reports geared for ongoing monitoring, auditing, and governance workflows at scale.
• Segmentation for least-privilege admin: Virtual Tenants (built from 400+ filters) enable delegated administration and reduced blast radius – useful when drift risk is tied to too many admins/overbroad roles.
• Automation to prevent “human drift”: 150+ no-code actions and workflows to standardize lifecycle changes (on/offboarding, sprawl control), reducing configuration entropy over time.
• Enterprise scale + credibility: Proven footprint (4,500+ tenants, 20M users, 132.5B records) and compliance posture (ISO 27001/27018/9001, SOC 2 & 3, iRAP).

Weaknesses/limits

• Requires program design to get full value: Like any enterprise governance platform, outcomes depend on how you define baselines, exceptions, ownership, and response workflows (it’s not “set it and forget it”).
• Adoption/change management: Teams may need time to operationalize segmentation (Virtual Tenants) and automation safely in regulated environments.

Best-fit: CoreView fits best when you need a broad, operational drift program for M365 – continuous monitoring, policy baselines, multi-tenant governance and least-privilege admin segmentation plus the ability to restore configuration state after mistakes or incidents.

Obsidian Security

What it is: SaaS security platform with strong detection and risk analytics; often centered on identity, app access, and anomalous SaaS activity, plus posture-style controls.

Strengths (for M365 drift)

• Excellent for “drift” defined as identity and app-access change: OAuth grants, risky apps, anomalous access, privilege misuse signals.
• Strong context around who/what changed access and why it matters (risk-driven triage).
• Helps detect dangerous configuration-adjacent changes (consent, app permissions) that often precede persistence.

Weaknesses/limits (for M365 drift)

• Not typically built for comprehensive tenant configuration baselining across Exchange/SharePoint/Teams admin settings.
• Limited stateful desired-vs-actual coverage for the broad M365 config surface area.
• Generally no configuration backup/restore capability for tenant settings.
• Better positioned as access-risk drift detection than as “configuration drift management.”

Best fit: SecOps teams that want SaaS threat detection and posture for Microsoft 365 and other SaaS, with emphasis on risky admin activity, suspicious access patterns, and app/OAuth risk. Most valuable when you’re trying to detect and investigate misuse and compromise indicators – with configuration drift treated as one contributing signal, not the primary control plane.

Orca Security  

What it is: CNAPP platform with SaaS posture coverage included in the broader product.

Strengths (for M365 drift)

• Good for seeing M365 posture in the context of broader cloud security posture and risk.
• Can help identify posture regressions that materially increase exposure.
• Useful for orgs that want fewer tools and prefer consolidated risk visibility.

Weaknesses/limits (for M365 drift)

• Typically not designed for deep, operational M365 configuration drift management (broad setting coverage, rich diffs, lifecycle workflows).
• Limited baseline customization and exceptions compared to drift-first tools.
• Limited historical config state/versioning beyond findings timelines.
• Config restore/rollback for M365 tenant settings is generally not a core feature.

Best fit: Teams using Orca as their primary CNAPP who want to extend governance to include SaaS/M365 posture signals for consolidated visibility and prioritization. Most appropriate when your drift requirement is “alert on risky posture changes” rather than “track and govern thousands of M365 settings with granular state history and exception handling.”

Reco  

What it is: An SSPM/SaaS security platform focused on identifying and reducing risk across SaaS applications – commonly positioned around SaaS posture, exposure visibility, and risky configuration/access findings for platforms like M365.

Strengths (for M365 drift)

• Fast visibility into security posture misconfigurations and risky settings across M365.
• Good for baseline-style checks (control alignment) and reporting for security teams.
• Helps surface exposure drift (e.g., risky sharing/access patterns) even when no one is intentionally “managing config.”

Weaknesses/limits (for M365 drift)

• More finding-led than stateful desired-vs-actual config management across hundreds of tenant settings.
• Typically limited forensics-grade configuration version history (“what exactly changed, from what to what, over time”).
• Usually no true configuration backup/restore for tenant settings (rollback is not the core workflow).
• Exception handling can be control-centric vs the richer “approved deviation” model drift programs need.

Best fit: Reco fits best when you want security posture drift signals – ongoing detection of risky states and exposures in Microsoft 365 (and other SaaS) – with prioritized findings and governance-style oversight, rather than deep tenant configuration lifecycle management.

Valence Security

What it is: SaaS security platform focused on SSPM-style posture, SaaS access governance insights, and risky configuration detection.

Strengths (for M365 drift)

• Strong for monitoring SaaS security posture and identity/exposure drift in Microsoft 365.
• Useful when “drift” includes changes in risky access patterns and third-party app connections.
• Can help highlight newly introduced risky configurations and posture regressions.

Weaknesses/limits (for M365 drift)

• May not go deep enough into the long tail of tenant configuration settings across all M365 workloads.
• Drift is often represented as issues/findings over time, not complete config-state history.
• Rollback/restore of tenant configuration generally not provided.
• Custom baselines and nuanced exception workflows can be more limited than drift-first tools.

Best fit: Organizations that want SaaS access governance – especially around third-party app permissions, OAuth risk, and over-privileged access – to reduce identity and integration-driven exposure in Microsoft 365. Strongest when the “drift” concern is who/what has access and what apps can do, not comprehensive tenant configuration drift management.

Wiz

What it is: A broader cloud security platform (CNAPP) that also includes SaaS security posture capabilities.

Strengths (for M365 drift)

• Useful for correlating M365 posture signals into a broader cloud risk graph (identity, endpoints, workloads).
• Can flag high-impact posture regressions that create real attack paths (good for prioritization).
• Strong when your drift program is part of a larger cloud exposure management initiative.

Weaknesses/limits (for M365 drift)

• M365 drift is usually not the primary depth area; coverage tends to be higher-level than M365-specialist drift tools.
• Often limited granularity and completeness for deep tenant configuration diffing across workloads.
• Forensics-grade config history and “approved baseline + exceptions” workflows are usually not core strengths.
• Config backup/restore for M365 settings is generally out of scope.

Best fit: Cloud security programs that already run Wiz for CNAPP/CSPM + identity and exposure correlation and want M365 signals included in a single risk picture. It’s strongest when M365 is one input into cross-domain risk prioritization, rather than the system of record for detailed M365 configuration baselines, diffs, and change timelines.

Why specialized tools matter (and where native solutions fall short)

Microsoft tools can provide logs and point-in-time exports. Operationalizing those logs is where things get tricky. Specialized drift tooling becomes necessary when you need:

• one operational view across key workloads,
• baseline-aware prioritization (“what control did this break?”),
• approvals that prevent drift in the first place, and
• recovery capabilities that don’t rely on manual reconstruction.

The risks of choosing poorly

Microsoft tools might be OK for drift management if you meet these criteria:  

• One tenant, low change volume.
• A dedicated engineering team that can maintain scripts and dashboards.
• Tight change control with clear ownership for every workload.

However, third-party tools become essential if you need any of the following:

• Multiple tenants or complex business segmentation.
• Regulated audit requirements and repeatable evidence collection.
• High operational tempo, frequent admin changes, and distributed teams.
• A need to restore configuration after incidents or compromise.

The most common areas you’re going to fail if you make the wrong choice are going to be  

Getting alerts without context (no baseline mapping, no owner routing), coverage that’s too shallow (only “enabled/disabled,” missing key values), drift reports that generate backlog with no remediation lane, and no rollback plan, leaving teams hesitant to remediate under pressure.

CoreView: Setting a new standard for configuration drift management

CoreView gives you Microsoft 365 Tenant Resilience: visibility, control, and recovery.

It has the ability to tell you what change has been made at a predefined interval and across some 8000 configuration details – details monitored, enforced, and backed up across key workloads. You can see the delta and if required you can put rules in place for an automated approval cycle. It provides you with:  

• Built-in CIS baseline plus customization (brief-supplied)
• Alerts when configurations change, plus “auto-rewind” (brief-supplied)
• Configuration backup and restore to support recovery after incidents (brief-supplied)

FAQs

What’s the fastest way to make drift alerts actionable?

Attach every drift finding to a baseline control, a before/after delta, an owner, and a remediation lane (auto-remediate, ticket-and-approve, or monitor-only).

Why does drift management get harder in Microsoft 365 than in a single control plane?

Because critical controls are distributed across Entra ID, Intune, Exchange, Teams, SharePoint/OneDrive, Purview, and Defender, and evidence often requires cross-portal correlation.

What should a drift tool prove during an audit?

It should show current state against an approved baseline, document exceptions with ownership and review dates, and provide defensible change history for high-risk settings.

How do you prevent drift instead of just detecting it?

Use approval workflows and policy enforcement for high-impact settings so risky changes require review before they land in production.

Why is configuration backup and restore part of drift management?

Because remediation and enforcement stall if teams can’t confidently roll back changes. Recovery capability turns drift governance into operational resilience.