BITSUMMIT strengthened Magna's Microsoft 365 security and governance, raising Secure Score and cutting incidents across global operations.
Magna had grown into a global automotive supplier the way most large enterprises do, business unit by business unit, and its Microsoft 365 estate had grown the same way. Each unit configured its own environment, and with no standard to hold them to, those configurations drifted apart. The result was a patchwork: access permissions no one was actively watching, auditing switched off in places, and legacy authentication protocols, the kind attackers probe for first, still enabled.
That fragmentation carried real exposure. Operating across many jurisdictions, Magna sits under GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific obligations at once, and there was no unified compliance strategy inside Microsoft 365 to satisfy them. The platform's stronger protections, Conditional Access, multi-factor authentication, Data Loss Prevention, advanced threat protection, were only partly switched on or missing entirely, so Magna was paying for capabilities it was not using to defend itself. With no centralized monitoring, the security team had little visibility into its own posture, limited ability to spot anomalies, and no fast way to respond when something looked wrong. Holding its position as an industry leader meant getting ahead of all of this rather than waiting for an incident to force the issue.
BITSUMMIT treated the sprawl as a single governance problem rather than a list of one-off fixes: assess the entire tenant against best practice, then close the gaps in priority order, the highest-risk first. The shape of the answer is layered, each control wrapping the one beneath it, with the whole estate watched continuously.
Assess the tenant against best practice
BITSUMMIT reviewed the security configuration across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, and Azure Active Directory, surfacing the misconfigurations that mattered: disabled MFA, unsecured Global Administrator accounts, excessive permissions, and enabled legacy authentication. The same pass evaluated Magna's data handling against GDPR and other regulations, checked which security features were actually in use, and found that Conditional Access was absent, DLP was missing or misconfigured, and audit logging and alerting were too thin to catch suspicious activity.
Standardize identity and access
From the findings, BITSUMMIT built a prioritized roadmap and executed it. MFA was rolled out to all users, starting with high-privilege accounts, and Conditional Access policies restricted access by user location, device compliance, and risk level. Adopting least privilege meant cutting the number of Global Administrators and moving to role-based access control.
Protect data and meet compliance
Azure Information Protection was used to classify and label sensitive data, DLP policies were configured in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams to stop inadvertent sharing, and unified audit logging was enabled with extended retention to satisfy regulatory requirements.
Add advanced threat protection and monitoring
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 was deployed with Safe Attachments and Safe Links against phishing and malware, backed by Microsoft Threat Intelligence. Microsoft Secure Score now tracks posture continuously, and Microsoft Sentinel provides alerting on critical events with automated response.
Implement together and hand over
BITSUMMIT implemented the changes alongside Magna's IT team, guiding the complex configurations, then ran workshops on managing the security features, reading Secure Score, and responding to incidents. Full documentation of the policies, configurations, and governance framework left Magna's IT and compliance teams a clear reference.
Standardizing security across every business unit lifted Magna's Microsoft Secure Score by 35% and, within six months, cut security incidents, including phishing and unauthorized-access attempts, by 25%. Eliminating the per-unit inconsistencies removed a large share of the risk on its own.
Compliance got easier to hold and to prove. Data classification, DLP, and improved audit logging strengthened Magna's position under GDPR and other regulations, and the comprehensive audit trails made reporting and audits smoother. Putting the platform's own security capabilities to work increased advanced-feature adoption by 40%, for better return on the licences Magna already owned, while automation and centralized management reduced the administrative load on IT by around 20%. With Azure Sentinel and Microsoft Threat Intelligence in place, the security team now has real-time visibility and faster incident response, and can manage threats proactively rather than reactively.
Tell us what you're trying to modernize, secure or migrate. We'll bring a plan and a named senior engineer.
Schedule a call →
Follow our social media channels; we are a supportive community sharing meaningful content.
