ISPM is the continuous practice of reviewing identity configurations, permissions, and policies to find (and fix) weaknesses before a hacker does.

While it's tempting to group ISPM with identity and access management (IAM), they serve separate purposes. IAM solutions focus on getting access levels right when you first provision them. Posture tools take a longer view and continuously evaluate whether that access stays appropriate over time. You can have awesome IAM processes and still be exposed if conditional access policies shift, multi-factor authentication (MFA) gets disabled for an emergency that becomes "we always do it this way," or when a guest account accumulates permissions beyond the intended scope.

When you're comparing Microsoft identity management solutions, look for these critical features first:

• Visibility into Microsoft Entra ID and Conditional Access: It's not enough to know when someone changes a security setting. You also need to understand how conditional access policies are structured, where those policies allow exceptions to the stated rules, and who gets which exclusions.

• Alerting and reporting of risky configurations: This includes longstanding Microsoft 365 security risks that creep into your environment, like overly permissive service accounts, legacy authentication allowed by an expired risk assessment, or administrator roles assigned to dormant accounts.

• Monitoring and alerting on posture drift when settings are changed: Your environment is never going to stay static. Someone approves a user request by tweaking a policy setting, and now your baseline is wrong until you manually update it.

• Clear remediation instructions and effort estimates: If you use an ISPM tool that identifies a problem but doesn't guide you through fixing it (and how that change could impact users), you've traded one bucket of work for another.

Security posture management tools give you visibility into potential problems so you can catch them before an auditor does. That means less re-work during compliance reviews, less panic when Microsoft mentions a new security feature, and fewer "who set this up?" conversations. If your IT resources are stretched thin, continuous monitoring is also the difference between discovering a risky configuration change during the week it happens or during the security incident.

The team with the most features doesn’t automatically win. Historically, standalone ISPM solutions are notorious for gathering findings and not providing remediation support. That's a fine service model when you have internal identity security experts on staff 24/7. It's far less useful if you only have a couple of people on your team who "kinda know how to secure Microsoft 365."

Since most findings generated by standalone policy deployment tool require specialized identity knowledge to understand, you end up with more actions and nothing complete. Critical findings don't always include impact details. Something can be flagged as "critical" for non-compliance reasons while ignoring the business realities. Instead of focusing solely on how to choose identity security software, see if the vendor can answer these questions:

• What happens when a tool detects a potential risk?

• Who reviews the findings?

• Does your team have the resources to safely implement the recommended fix?

• Who performs remediation if not?

Too often, the answers are "everyone" or "the person with the fewest projects going on right now." Either option may work for very small teams.

Don't just sniff-test your options. A good way to vet potential ISPM partners starts with seeing how they handle the configuration reviews and remediation activities your team is already doing daily.

Ask for a spreadsheet of current Entra ID and Conditional Access coverage compared to what their tool monitors, then change a setting to see if they detect drift from secure configurations. When they send you sample alerts, ask for remediation instructions too. Does the proposed fix read like something a generalist could understand and complete, or do the instructions assume you have an in-house identity specialist?

Ask how your team will handle things that can't be automatically remediated. Tools that flag an issue then disappear until the next weekly report cycle are about as helpful as going manual.

Huntress Managed ISPM gives you a managed framework for identity hardening that’s designed and continuously updated by security experts, built to keep pace with new Microsoft 365 features and evolving best practices.

This includes automated enforcement of secure configurations rather than intermittent audits, clear user impact assessments before deployment, guided rollout of policies so you know where to start, clear notifications and remediations steps when a control can’t be auto-remediated so findings don’t just sit in a report, as well as support for multiple environments if you're an MSP who needs to manage security posture across teams.

See Huntress Managed ISPM in action and book a demo today.