How MSPs can future-proof Microsoft 365 management with automation and security

Modern work has reshaped client expectations by enabling greater flexibility, broader collaboration, and improved employee satisfaction. Organizations can hire from anywhere, teams operate across time zones, and employees have more control over how they work. 

But these benefits come with trade-offs. As workforces become more distributed, the digital environment grows—and so does the risk. Every new device, app, and identity increases the potential for cyber threats. 

For MSPs, meeting today’s demands means balancing agility with airtight security, scalable processes, and operational efficiency. It’s a complex challenge, especially in the face of hybrid work, evolving compliance standards, and constant security pressures. 

Nerdio Manager for MSP simplifies this complexity. With built-in automation, standardized management, and proactive security monitoring, it gives MSPs the tools to deliver resilient and profitable Microsoft 365 services. 

Common challenges MSPs face today include: 

• Data sprawl across unmanaged devices and cloud services: Employees often access sensitive company data from personal devices, home networks, or unsanctioned apps. Without strong controls, it’s easy for data to leak beyond the organization’s perimeter. 

• Access mismanagement that leads to insider threats: Without strict identity and access controls, users often have more permissions than they need. This “over-permissioning” not only increases the risk of accidental data exposure, but it also leaves organizations vulnerable to insider breaches—whether malicious or accidental. 

• Configuration drift that undermines security and compliance: Manual updates, inconsistent policy enforcement, and tenant-specific deviations create hidden vulnerabilities over time. As settings drift from their secure baselines, clients may unknowingly fall out of compliance with key regulations, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CMMC. 

• Manual workloads that drain time and introduce human error: Traditional management approaches require IT teams to jump between multiple portals and tenants. Each manual task—setting policies, updating devices, configuring security settings—is an opportunity for mistakes, omissions, and inconsistencies that compromise both efficiency and security. 

Traditional management simply can’t keep pace with the complexity and risk of modern work. MSPs need smarter strategies, including automation to handle repetitive tasks, standardization to ensure consistent security, and centralized monitoring to catch issues before they escalate. 

Without these approaches, it’s not just operational inefficiency that’s at stake—it’s client trust, compliance, and long-term business growth. 

6 key capabilities for smarter Microsoft 365 management 

 Managing Microsoft 365 today takes more than basic admin. It demands a strategic, scalable approach that strengthens security and eliminates inefficiencies across tenants. 

Nerdio Manager for MSP is purpose-built for this. It provides the tools MSPs need to automate, secure, and standardize Microsoft 365 operations without adding complexity. 

From onboarding and compliance to security hardening and device management, Nerdio Manager delivers the visibility and control to serve clients smarter and faster. 

Let’s explore six key capabilities transforming how MSPs manage Microsoft 365 and driving better outcomes across the board. 

1. Role-Based Access Control: Lock down permissions 

Over-permissioned users are one of the leading causes of insider breaches—and it’s often unintentional. When employees or admins have more access than necessary, the risk of accidental data loss, malicious activity, or security gaps increases significantly. Without a way to tightly control permissions, MSPs expose themselves and their clients to unnecessary risk. 

Nerdio’s Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) feature gives MSPs a smarter, more secure way to manage internal and client-facing access. With RBAC, you can: 

• Create customized roles based on real job functions: Tailor permissions to match specific responsibilities, whether it’s tier 1 helpdesk agents, project engineers, or external IT staff. No more blanket administrator rights that expose sensitive systems unnecessarily. 

• Apply granular permissions to internal and co-managed users: Define exactly what actions users can take inside Nerdio Manager and across client environments. 

• Set approval workflows for sensitive actions: For high-risk tasks, such as wiping a device, disabling a user, or adjusting conditional access, you can require supervisor approval before the action is executed. This adds a critical layer of oversight to prevent mistakes and malicious actions. 

The result? Stronger operational security, improved compliance posture, and fewer costly mistakes.  

2. Solution Baselines: Eliminate configuration drift 

Keeping client environments aligned with best practices shouldn’t require endless manual audits or constant guesswork. Without a consistent framework, MSPs often find themselves reacting to misconfigurations after the damage is done, whether it’s a security gap, compliance violation, or user error. 

Nerdio’s Solution Baselines change that dynamic by helping MSPs move from reactive to proactive management. With solution baselines, you can: 

• Define a “gold standard” configuration: Set your ideal settings across key Microsoft 365 services, such as Entra ID, Intune, Exchange Online, Defender, SharePoint, and OneDrive. 

• Monitor client environments for deviations: Automatically track where client tenants drift from your defined baseline. No more guessing or relying on error-prone manual spot checks to identify risks. 

• Choose to enforce or report: Depending on client needs, you can either auto-correct drift by enforcing your baseline configurations or simply report on deviations, empowering conversations about necessary changes. 

Solution Baselines make security and compliance an ongoing process rather than a one-time setup. They save MSPs hours of manual auditing, onboarding, and remediation work while ensuring client environments stay secure, consistent, and aligned with best practices—without the heavy operational burden. 

3. Secure Score monitoring: Prove and improve security 

Microsoft’s Secure Score is a critical tool for assessing the security posture of a Microsoft 365 tenant. It highlights vulnerabilities, recommends best practices, and gives organizations a measurable way to track improvements over time. But for MSPs managing dozens—or even hundreds—of tenants, manually checking and acting on Secure Scores is time-consuming, inconsistent, and easily overlooked. 

Nerdio Manager transforms Secure Score management from a scattered, manual process into a centralized, strategic advantage. With Nerdio, MSPs can: 

• Aggregate Secure Scores across all tenants: View every client’s security posture from a single dashboard, eliminating the need to log in and out of individual portals. 

• Categorize and prioritize recommended improvements: Quickly identify which actions will have the greatest impact on boosting a client’s score and where to focus your efforts for the biggest payoff. 

• Track security improvements over time: Nerdio Manager automatically tracks Secure Score trends, helping you clearly demonstrate measurable risk reduction and progress in your clients’ environments. 

The impact goes beyond internal operations. With easy-to-access, up-to-date reporting, MSPs can prove their value to clients—showing not just what services were delivered, but how security outcomes have improved month over month or quarter over quarter. It’s a tangible way to strengthen client relationships, justify renewals, and build long-term trust. 

4. Risky and Stale User Reporting: Act on hidden vulnerabilities 

Risky accounts—whether flagged due to suspicious sign-in activity, credential leaks, or unusual behavior patterns—often fly under the radar in busy Microsoft 365 environments. Without active monitoring, these accounts can become entry points for breaches, data loss, or insider threats. 

Nerdio Manager makes it easy for MSPs to spot and address risky or stale accounts before they become liabilities. Through automated Microsoft intelligence, Nerdio enables you to: 

• Detect potential breaches early: Instantly surface accounts flagged as high-risk, so you can intervene before vulnerabilities are exploited. 

• Take swift action: Disable, reset, or investigate compromised accounts directly from a centralized interface—no need to jump between tenant portals or wait for manual audits. 

• Maintain a cleaner, more secure environment: Identify stale accounts (users who haven’t signed in for an extended period) and remove or deactivate them, minimizing your attack surface and improving security hygiene. 

By automating the detection and management of risky accounts, Nerdio empowers MSPs to act faster, reduce human error, and strengthen security across their entire client base without adding operational overhead. 

5. Policy Baselines: Scale device and access management 

Manually configuring Intune policies and conditional access settings for each individual client quickly becomes a bottleneck as your MSP grows. The more tenants you manage, the more time-consuming and error-prone this manual work becomes, especially when policies need updating or auditing. 

Nerdio Manager streamlines this process with Policy Baselines that make Intune management scalable and efficient. With Policy Baselines, you can: 

• Import existing Intune policies: Easily bring in policies you’ve already created, eliminating the need to rebuild configurations from scratch. 

• Template and version control policies: Group related policies into reusable templates, track version history, and roll back to previous versions if needed, ensuring consistent, auditable management. 

• Assign policies across tenants with just a few clicks: Instead of configuring settings tenant by tenant, you can apply standardized baselines to multiple clients simultaneously, dramatically cutting down deployment time. 

Policy management becomes dynamic and centralized, making it easy to push updates, manage exceptions, and pass audits without scrambling through multiple admin portals. It’s a smarter way to enforce security and compliance at scale while saving valuable engineering hours. 

6. Unified Application Management: Simplify third-party software deployment 

Keeping client devices updated with critical apps and security patches is essential—but manually managing software across multiple tenants can eat up countless hours and create gaps in coverage. 

Unified Application Management (UAM) in Nerdio Manager eliminates the need for constant oversight by giving MSPs a centralized, scalable way to manage applications across their customer base. With UAM, you can: 

• Deploy apps easily: Leverage Microsoft’s Winget repository of thousands of trusted applications—or use custom private repositories—to deploy both common and specialized apps without complex repackaging. 

• Assign apps across tenants: Create deployment policies that target specific user groups or device groups across multiple clients, making it simple to standardize application availability and security. 

• Keep devices current automatically: Nerdio continuously checks for updates and ensures assigned applications remain up to date without needing to manually push updates or worry about version control. 

Unified Application Management turns what was once a tedious, error-prone task into a seamless, automated process. It’s third-party patching made simple, scalable, and fully integrated into your Microsoft 365 management workflows, helping you boost security, reduce downtime, and deliver a smoother experience for your clients. 

Why standardization and automation matter more than ever 

Modern MSPs are under intense pressure to do more with fewer resources and tighter margins. Without strong automation and standardization practices in place, it’s easy to fall into a reactive cycle that drains time, increases risk, and limits growth potential. 

The path forward is clear: by investing in automation and standardization, MSPs can shift from a reactive, manual service model to a proactive, scalable, and profitable one. 

Automation and security-first Microsoft 365 management isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s the foundation for sustainable growth. MSPs that embrace this shift will not only improve operational efficiency but also strengthen their value proposition, future-proof their offerings, and build a resilient, competitive business for years to come. 

See Nerdio in action 

If you’re ready to get a firsthand look at how Nerdio Manager for MSP empowers providers to manage Microsoft 365 environments smarter, faster, and more securely, we invite you to dive deeper. 

Watch the full session here to explore real-world use cases, see live demonstrations of key features, and hear expert insights on how to future-proof your MSP practice. 

Prefer a more tailored experience? Our team is ready to help. Reach out to Nerdio for a personalized demo and discover how you can leverage Nerdio Manager to optimize operations, strengthen client relationships, and scale your Microsoft 365 services with confidence.