Never Show Microsoft’s Secure Score to Clients

You work hard to meet your client’s expectations and do your best to push them to what in your judgement is an ideal security state, ever evolving as that may be. You know their business, you know their people, and it’s taken you a long time to understand the balance between security and ease-of-use that they can live with. So, if no one is making you, why on Earth would you show your client how they stack up to Microsoft’s vision for the most secure organization possible? What does Secure Score have to do with them?

Imagine working with a personal trainer who instead of giving you measured activities that you can handle with continual and attainable goals, showed you a picture of the most beautiful fitness model in the world as a goal, and told you all at once everything you can do to be the most healthy person. One approach can lead to a long and productive relationship while the other is likely to send you running out the door and to a date with a large pizza.

Like when you get a blood test, a doctor might tell you something like “your cholesterol is a little high, but otherwise you’re pretty healthy, lay off the bacon” instead of handing you several pages of numbers. If left to interpret the blood test yourself, and comparing each number to the ideal, you might come away believing you’re on Death’s door. Consider it IT-guy bedside manner to make sure you show your client information they and everyone in their organization can understand.

Don’t rely on others to be a filter

It may very well be that your contact at your client’s organization can understand what a secure score is and why a perfect score isn’t necessarily worth it for them. But what if their extremely intense, never-got-anything-less-than-an-A-in-school boss happens upon a report from you including a Secure Score? At first, he might get excited to see a very respectable score of “380,” and momentarily feel good about such a large number. But then he shifts his gaze and comes to find this big number that he likes very much is out of a possible “697.”

Now, your point of contact might be there to explain to them what they are looking at, or for a variety of reasons their boss might walk away from the report thinking they are paying you a bunch of money to get mid-rate IT security. It’s right there in the report, Microsoft says so themselves.

Security isn’t a number or a point in time

You know that IT Security doesn’t happen once a month or once a quarter, it’s an ongoing process that requires constant adaptation and vigilance. Cloudradial helps MSPs and CSPs to stop manually reporting point-in-time data and start creating transparency with real-time information about client infrastructure and users. Cloudradial’s white-labeled client portal helps you communicate important security information to your client using an always-updating resource to help your client do their job and keep their end-users informed and trained.

Start a trial or schedule a demo to find a better way to communicate with your clients about IT security.