Microsoft 365: Compliance vs. Resilience – What’s the Difference?
The terms “compliance” and “resilience” are often used interchangeably, yet they represent two distinct and complementary approaches to protecting an organisation’s digital assets. For companies leveraging Microsoft 365, understanding this difference is critical for building a robust and sustainable security strategy. While compliance focuses on meeting a specific set of rules, resilience is about an organisation’s ability to withstand and recover from a cyber attack.
It’s also important to note that while compliance is important, being compliant doesn’t ensure that an organisation is secure or resilient.
The Foundation of Compliance: Meeting the Rules
Compliance is about adherence to laws, regulations, and industry standards. It’s a snapshot in time, a checkbox exercise to prove that your organisation has implemented the required controls. A prime example is the NIS 2 Directive. This European Union legislation, which came into force in early 2023, aims to strengthen cybersecurity across critical sectors. It mandates that a broad range of entities, from energy to healthcare, adopt “appropriate and proportionate” technical and organisational measures to manage their cybersecurity risks.
For a Microsoft 365 user, NIS 2 compliance means ensuring that the platform’s configurations and policies align with the directive’s requirements. This includes implementing controls for incident handling, business continuity, supply chain security, and risk analysis. In essence, it’s about meeting a legal obligation and demonstrating that you are following a pre-defined set of rules to secure your systems. Failure to comply can result in significant financial penalties, such as a maximum of at least €10 million or 2% of the total worldwide annual turnover for “essential entities”, highlighting the directive’s serious nature.
The Goal of Resilience: Bouncing Back from Attacks
Resilience, on the other hand, is a continuous, proactive state of being. It’s not just about meeting a standard; it’s about an organisation’s capability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to disruptive cyber incidents. A resilient organisation can continue to operate essential services even in the face of a successful attack. This goes beyond the static requirements of compliance and into the dynamic reality of a live threat.
A strong resilience strategy is built on a cyclical framework that helps an organisation continuously improve its security posture. This framework can be understood through four key pillars: Assess, Harden, Monitor and Respond.
- Assess: This initial phase involves a comprehensive evaluation of your environment to identify vulnerabilities and risks. It’s about understanding your current security posture, uncovering misconfigurations, and pinpointing areas that need improvement.
- Harden: Once risks are identified, the next step is to strengthen your defenses. This involves automating the implementation of security best practices, such as configuring multi-factor authentication, applying least-privilege principles, and disabling legacy protocols. Hardening your environment makes it more difficult for attackers to gain a foothold.
- Monitor: A resilient strategy requires continuous vigilance. This pillar involves ongoing surveillance of your systems to detect unusual activities and potential threats in real time. AI-driven technology is often used here to analyze data and identify patterns that could indicate a breach.
- Respond: When a threat is detected, having a plan is crucial. The response pillar focuses on swiftly mitigating risks. This includes automated response capabilities that can contain a threat and manual procedures for incident handling and recovery, ensuring operational continuity.
Striving for Resilience will enable you to evolve as the threat landscape changes even though the Compliance Framework may not have changed.
The Complementary Relationship
While compliance and resilience are different, they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are deeply intertwined. An effective compliance program, such as the one required by NIS 2, can serve as a strong foundation for building cyber resilience. By fulfilling the risk management and incident reporting requirements of a directive, an organisation is already taking significant steps toward becoming more resilient.
For example, the NIS 2 requirement for risk analysis directly aligns with the “Assess” pillar of resilience. Similarly, the directive’s focus on business continuity and incident handling mirrors the “Respond” pillar. Compliance provides a baseline, a set of mandatory controls, while resilience takes these controls and makes them part of a living, breathing security program that can adapt to new and unknown threats.
As an additional example, while a Compliance Framework and associated policies will mandate Multi-factor Authentication, Compliance only requires that a MFA policy be in place for all Users. However, upon the audit or testing of this policy it is found that SMS or voice calls are allowed, both of which can be circumvented by a SIM swap or phishing, instead of fraud resistant methods like the Microsoft Authenticator app push notifications or FIDO2 keys.
In the context of Microsoft 365, achieving a high level of both compliance and resilience means leveraging the platform’s native security tools, like Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview, to not only meet regulatory obligations but also to build a proactive defense that can withstand the most sophisticated attacks. By moving beyond a simple “check the box” mentality and embracing a culture of continuous improvement, an organisation can ensure it is both compliant with regulations and truly resilient against modern cyber threats.
Ready to move beyond basic compliance and build true cyber resilience in Microsoft 365? Elasticito can help you implement a framework to proactively protect your organisation.