Identity security controls are the policies, configurations, and guardrails set up within your Microsoft 365 tenants that govern who can access what and under which circumstances.

For most SMBs and MSPs operating in Microsoft 365, identity security controls will include:

• Multi-factor authentication policies
• Conditional access rules
• Role assignments and administratorships
• Account lifecycle management
• Application permission oversight

Each of these represents a potential attack path against your organization if they're misconfigured, not implemented at all, or left stale.

For teams looking for a place to start with their identity hardening journey, NIST provides great supplemental guidance. While they won't dictate which permissions your Salesforce admin needs or whether your team should use third-party conditional access, NIST standards do provide excellent guardrails around identity proofing, authentication strength, and federation.

Zero trust is a security posture that your team must build across your environment—and least-privilege access controls are its foundation.

When it comes to Microsoft 365, implementing zero trust access management strategies includes:

• Enforcing conditional access policies that account for device compliance, sign-in risk, and user location
• Blocking legacy authentication protocols that allow endpoints to circumvent your modern authentication controls
• Regularly reviewing guest and external users' access levels (these accounts are often overlooked during routine access reviews and tend to be over-privileged)

Privileged accounts aren't the only places where identity risk tends to creep. Workforce access management is another area where gaps commonly form.

Enforce MFA for all users and admins

Enablement gaps are common here because service accounts and break-glass admin accounts are often assumed to be "too hidden" for attackers to find. Risk arises when you make these decisions.

Audit and remediate stale accounts

Former employees, contracted workers who left the company, and old service accounts that nobody remembers why they were created. Stale accounts are low-suspicion, high-value targets for attackers who spend time digging through your directory.

Review risky mailbox and forwarding rules

Monitoring mailbox and forwarding rules allows you to catch this risky behavior before it's exploited. Attackers frequently use these rules as a stealth mechanism in Business Email Compromise (BEC) campaigns, creating filters to auto-delete security alerts or hide their communications so they can persist in a compromised account without triggering suspicion.

Review app permissions and admin consent policies

Many teams struggle to account for how many applications have been granted access to user mailboxes, calendars, and organizational files. Permissions granted to applications are a substantial identity attack surface that should be inventoried and reviewed regularly.

Tighten service account permissions

These accounts are frequently created when someone needs elevated permissions to perform a specific task. They rarely have enforcement policies tied to them, and they're being targeted as a result.

Identity hardening isn't just about what's happening inside your Microsoft 365 tenants. Physical identity access management solutions can help protect against attack paths as well.

From smart card authentication to hardware security keys to device-bound credentials, provide an assurance factor that password-based or software MFA authentication just can't match.

If your organization handles sensitive data or is subject to compliance requirements, it's worth looking into phishing-resistant MFA solutions like FIDO2 security keys.

Your Microsoft 365 environment doesn't maintain itself in a hardened state.

Whether it's a well-meaning new IT person who tweaks a conditional access policy to troubleshoot a login problem and forgets to document it, or an exception added to allow legacy authentication for an application that's used by five people but lives on your network, your identity security controls will change as people and environments evolve.

Attackers aren't always looking for new or novel techniques to break into your Microsoft 365 environment. Often, they’re getting in through basic gaps that leave identity attack paths wide open—targeting the weakest point rather than the most obvious one. They'll attack through the weakest identity path. That could be the app that was granted access to your org three years ago, and nobody thinks to check on it, or even an exception you added so one person can access the system on their iPad.

This is why a point-in-time audit of your Microsoft 365 controls just isn't enough to stay ahead of attackers. Continuous enforcement is critical because your attack surface is constantly changing.

Huntress Managed ISPM is built for exactly this kind of work: continuously pinpointing gaps in Microsoft Entra, Exchange, SharePoint, and more, rolling out Huntress-managed settings on a clear schedule, and catching policy drift within minutes—so you don’t have to wait for a quarterly audit to see what changed last week.

To see it in action alongside Managed ITDR and the rest of the Huntress platform, get a demo today.