Most organisations don’t fall victim to data breaches because of a lack of adequate tooling. They fall victim because something was overlooked. A patch wasn’t applied, an account wasn’t deprovisioned, or an employee clicked without thinking. In the rush to adopt new technologies in response to ever-changing threats, the basics of cyber security often get buried beneath more pressing, visible priorities.
Good cyber security hygiene practices start with maintenance. Cyber hygiene involves the practices that keep systems clean, updated, and defensible. It’s rarely headline-worthy, but when neglected, its absence is almost always felt first.
At a strategic level, cyber hygiene is not a checklist, it is a mindset. It reflects an organisation’s ability to manage and reduce risk in a systematic, scalable way. This is particularly important in complex environments where multiple systems, identities, and services interact, often with incomplete visibility.
Why Poor Cyber Hygiene Persists
Despite its importance, cyber hygiene remains a persistent weak spot for many. The reasons behind this are typically multifactored, and include:
Operational Pressures
IT and security teams are largely focused on urgent issues such as resolving incidents, deploying new services, or responding to audits, leaving routine hygiene tasks deprioritised.
Shadow IT and Application Sprawl
As users adopt new and potentially unsanctioned tools, and organisations accumulate redundant systems over time, it becomes more and more difficult to adequately maintain consistent controls and necessary visibility.
Lack of Automation
Manual processes make it challenging for lean IT teams to maintain cyber hygiene at scale. Without considered automation, tasks such as patching or privilege reviews can fall through the cracks.
Cultural Disconnect
In many organisations, cyber security is still seen as a technical issue, rather than a shared responsibility. This limits employee engagement and leadership investment in hygiene initiatives.
Five Steps to An Effective Cyber Hygiene Strategy
To build an effective programme of cyber hygiene, organisations must address several interconnected areas. Each component strengthens the security baseline and reduces the opportunity for threat actors to gain a foothold.
1. Asset Visibility and Inventory Management
It is impossible to protect what you cannot see. Asset visibility is the cornerstone of cyber hygiene, enabling organisations to identify, assess, and manage risk across their digital estate. This includes not only traditional hardware and software, but also cloud services, virtual machines, mobile devices, user accounts, APIs, and operational technology (OT) assets.
Maintaining an accurate inventory is not a one-time task. Rather, it requires regular validation, real-time updates, and integration with identity and access management systems.
2. Vulnerability and Patch Management
From high-profile ransomware outbreaks to data breaches caused by known bugs, attackers frequently take advantage of delayed or inconsistent patching processes.
An effective vulnerability management programme begins with continuous scanning to detect missing updates or exposed configurations. Platforms like Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management offer visibility into software versions, patch status, and configuration risks across hybrid environments. However, detection is only the first step. Organisations must prioritise remediation based on real-world risk.
For example, a patch for an internet-facing application used to process sensitive data should be deployed within, at most, 48 hours, whereas a low-risk update to an internal legacy system may be scheduled during a maintenance window. This risk-based prioritisation can help to ensure that critical updates are not delayed by operational constraints.
3. Identity and Access Hygiene
With the rise of cloud platforms and remote work, identity has become the new cyber security perimeter. Unfortunately, identity systems are often mismanaged, with accounts left active after employees leave the organisation, overly broad access rights granted, and credentials that rely on weak password practices.
To address this, organisations should adopt a policy of strong, passwordless authentication. FIDO2-based authentication offers resistance against AiTM phishing and credential stuffing, far beyond traditional MFA methods.
Alongside authentication, access control must follow the principle of least privilege. Users should only receive the permissions they need, and nothing more. Reviewing entitlements on a regular basis is also essential, such as ensuring that administrative rights are revoked once a specific project ends or an employee changes role.
Identity lifecycle management is another vital component of this facet of cyber security hygiene. Systems should be in place to automatically detect when accounts are inactive or no longer associated with a business function, triggering deactivation workflows. This reduces the risk of orphaned accounts being used in credential-based attacks.
4. Data Hygiene and Classification
Knowing where your sensitive data resides, who has access to it, and how it is being handled is fundamental to any cyber hygiene strategy. Yet many organisations operate without clear visibility into their data estate, leaving critical information vulnerable to accidental exposure or intentional exfiltration.
Data classification tools such as Microsoft Purview’s Information Protection allow organisations to apply consistent labels to documents, emails, and files based on content sensitivity. These labels can then be used to enforce protection policies such as encryption, access restrictions, and usage auditing.
For example, confidential internal documents can be automatically encrypted and made inaccessible to unauthorised external recipients, while public-facing content can be shared freely. Integration with Purview’s Data Loss Prevention tools adds another layer of control, detecting and blocking unauthorised attempts to move sensitive data to unmanaged devices or personal cloud accounts.
Regular audits should also be conducted to ensure that data policies are being followed, and that sensitive information is not lingering in unsecure locations such as legacy file shares, personal drives, or unmanaged collaboration or productivity platforms.
5. Security Awareness and Behavioural Training
Even the best security infrastructure can be undermined by a single human error. Security awareness training is essential, but it must go beyond annual e-learning modules. Effective programmes are continuous, adaptive, and tailored to user roles.
Security awareness should also be integrated into broader cultural initiatives within the organisation. For security training to be effective, employees must feel that cyber security is not a hindrance to productivity but a shared responsibility, and that reporting a mistake will be welcomed, and not penalised.
Each one of these components is essential in isolation, but their true strength lies in how they support and reinforce one another. Together, they form the operational backbone of a mature cyber security posture with effective hygiene practices, that is resilient not just to external threats but to internal oversights.
Next Steps
For organisations seeking to reduce exposure and build long-term cyber resilience, hygiene is where your strategy should begin. Threatscape offers a range of complimentary advisory services, crafted by our award-winning Microsoft security practice, to enable organisations to get the most out of their Microsoft investment and ensure their solutions are working to best practice standards with cyber hygiene in mind.
- The Microsoft Purview Advisory Service helps you to understand the data security protections available within your Microsoft 365 license. You’ll receive advice and recommendations on the type of data security risks companies face, and insight into how Purview and other capabilities within Microsoft 365 help defend against those risks.
- The Microsoft Entra ID Advisory Service helps you understand the identity threats we see lodged against organisations every day, and the associated security protections available within your Microsoft 365 licence. You’ll gain insight and recommendations on how Entra ID and other capabilities within Microsoft 365 help defend cloud identities against a wealth of threats
