Standards

The Standards page ensures consistent configuration across your Microsoft 365 tenants by reapplying baseline settings every three hours. This prevents unauthorized changes and maintains security.

Overview

Standards in CIPP ensure consistent configurations across your Microsoft 365 tenants by reapplying baseline settings every three hours. This automatic enforcement prevents unauthorized changes and helps maintain security.

Note: By default, standards aren't applied to any tenants upon setup of CIPP. You must manually configure and enable them. Apply standards with a clear understanding of their effects, detailed in the video and walkthrough on this page.

Key Options:

• Report: Logs the current configuration.

• Alert: Sends notifications via ticket, email, or webhook.

• Remediate: Applies the configuration to the tenant.

Note: Disabling the "Remediate" option prevents future enforcement but does not undo previously applied changes.

Important Considerations:

• Companion Policies Some standards rely on additional policies in tools like Microsoft Intune to be fully effective. Ensure all required companion policies are configured to achieve the desired results.

• Deselecting Standards Deselecting a standard prevents it from being enforced in future cycles, but it does not undo its current configuration.

  • Example: If you deselect "Enable FIDO2 capabilities," the standard will stop enforcing this policy. However, if FIDO2 was already enabled, it will remain enabled.

• Precedence of Standards: Tenant-level standards override All Tenants standards. Example: If "Enable or disable 'external' warning in Outlook" is set to "false" for a specific tenant, it will stay disabled even if the All Tenants standard sets it to "true."

• Application Cadence: Standards reapply every three hours by default. If a setting changes outside of the standard, it will be overridden by the value specified in the standard during the next reapplication cycle.

Impact Levels

Each standard is labeled based on the level of change it introduces and its impact on users:

• Low Impact: Minimal or no user-facing effects.

• Medium Impact: May require some communication with users to prepare them for changes.

• High Impact: Significant changes that could affect daily workflows; coordinate with clients before applying.

Where to Next?

• Learn how to configure and apply standards for the first time on the Standards Setup page.

• Explore specific standards and their details on the List Standards page.

Plans exist to implement more standardized options and settings, along with an alerting system supporting RMM systems, webhooks or, e-mail.