Summary of Guardians of M365 Governance Ep.26

In Episode 26 of the Guardians of M365 Governance monthly webcast, Ragnar Heil (@RagnarH) and I spoke with Robert Edmondson, a Senior Director of Product Marketing for CoreView, on a hard truth for modern Microsoft 365 governance: data backup is not the same thing as tenant resilience. As more organizations roll out Copilot Studio agents and plug in new AI models, the governance surface area expands fast, and the “hope it’ll be fine” approach starts looking less like optimism and more like roulette.

A major theme within our discussion was configuration-state risk: most orgs have spent years building a tenant “cathedral” of settings across Entra, Intune, Defender, Exchange, SharePoint, Purview, and more, yet they often have no reliable way to document, back up, detect tampering, or restore those settings. The conversation highlighted how attackers increasingly target configurations (not just data), and how even vendor-driven changes can cause unexpected disruption. Without visibility into what changed and when, recovery becomes slow, expensive, and uncertain.

We then pivoted toward practical resilience patterns: baseline + drift detection + rapid rollback for configurations, and tenant segmentation / least privilege to shrink blast radius and reduce standing admin rights. The point isn’t “buy tools”; it’s to treat governance as an operational discipline: know what you have, know what’s changing, and make recovery a button-click exercise instead of an archeology project.

For more on this topic, check out Ragnar’s post that was discussed during the episode: How to Export and Import Microsoft 365 Tenant Configurations

If you missed the live stream, you can watch the recording here:

 

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