Entra ID audit vs Microsoft Secure Score: the differences

Microsoft Secure Score is a helpful starting point, but it was never designed to be a full security audit. If you rely on it alone, you are missing depth, prioritisation and on-premises coverage. Here is where a dedicated audit takes over.

What Secure Score does well

Secure Score is built into Microsoft 365 and gives a quick, free indication of your posture. It is a fine first signal — it flags obvious gaps and tracks a handful of improvement actions. For a small organisation getting started, it is better than nothing.

Where it falls short

1. Depth

Secure Score covers roughly eighty checks. A dedicated audit like EntraGUARD runs 283 controls across nine referentials — more than three times the coverage, including areas Secure Score simply does not assess.

2. No on-premises Active Directory

Secure Score is a cloud construct. It does not look at your on-premises Active Directory at all — yet AD is where some of the most dangerous privileged access lives. Any audit that stops at the cloud has a blind spot the size of your domain.

3. A number, not an action plan

Secure Score gives you a percentage and some suggestions, but not a prioritised remediation plan with severity, framework references and concrete steps. It tells you roughly where you are, not clearly what to do next.

4. No weighting you control

You cannot adjust Secure Score to your context — exclude controls that do not apply, or raise the weight of ones that are critical for you. A dedicated audit lets you define a custom baseline so the score reflects your requirements.

Side by side

Use both

This is not either/or. Keep an eye on Secure Score for a continuous cloud signal, and run a dedicated audit when you need depth, on-premises coverage, a defensible weighted score and a real remediation plan. One is a dashboard gauge; the other is the full inspection.