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Are Defender for Cloud Recommendations Ordered by Severity or Secure Score Impact?
Ace your AZ-500 exam by understanding how Microsoft Defender for Cloud prioritizes recommendations. Learn why recommendations are sorted by their impact on your Secure Score, not just by severity, to guide you in improving your security posture effectively.
Question
Security Center recommendations are listed in descending order of the severity of the security vulnerabilities they address.
A. TRUE
B. FALSE
Answer
B. FALSE
Explanation
The correct answer is B. FALSE. Recommendations in Microsoft Defender for Cloud (formerly Security Center) are not listed in descending order of severity. They are prioritized based on their potential impact on your overall Secure Score.
Alerts are listed in descending order of the point value to the Security Score.
Secure Score and Recommendation Prioritization
Microsoft Defender for Cloud calculates a Secure Score to provide a numerical representation of your security posture. Each security recommendation is associated with a specific point value. The main recommendations list is sorted to show the recommendations that will provide the largest point increase to your Secure Score first.
- Impact-Driven Sorting: This prioritization helps security teams focus their efforts on the tasks that will most significantly improve their organization’s security posture. A recommendation with a high point value is considered more critical to address.
- Example: A recommendation like “Enable MFA on accounts with owner permissions on your subscription” will have a very high point value and appear at the top of the list because it mitigates a significant risk. A lower-impact recommendation might appear further down.
Recommendations vs. Security Alerts
It is crucial to distinguish between recommendations and security alerts, as they are sorted differently.
- Recommendations: These are proactive suggestions for improving security hygiene and fixing misconfigurations. They are sorted by their potential Secure Score impact. Each recommendation also has a severity level (High, Medium, Low), but this is not the primary sorting factor in the main list.
- Security Alerts: These are reactive notifications about active threats or suspicious activities detected in your environment (e.g., malware detected, brute-force attack). Alerts are prioritized and sorted by their severity (High, Medium, Low) and the time of the event.
The explanation provided in the prompt is partially incorrect because it conflates alerts and recommendations. It is the recommendations that are sorted by their point value contribution to the Secure Score, not alerts. This design ensures that administrators are guided to fix the most impactful security weaknesses first.
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