Microsoft 365 audit for Mexican SMBs — the complete guide (frameworks, tools, deliverables)

What a Microsoft 365 audit actually is

A Microsoft 365 audit is not an antivirus scan, not a Secure Score printed to PDF, and not a 30-minute conversation with the IT team. It's a systematic evaluation of tenant configuration against published, verifiable baselines, with results that trace to primary sources and produce evidence that survives external-auditor scrutiny.

For a Mexican mid-market SMB — 50 to 500 employees, data subject to LFPDPPP and, if financial, CNBV — the audit has four mandatory components:

1. Technical coverage of Microsoft 365 controls — Identity, Email, Data, Devices, Apps, Audit.

2. Mapping to recognised frameworks — CIS Benchmark, CISA SCuBA, NIST CSF.

3. Translation to the Mexican regulatory context — LFPDPPP Art. 18, CNBV Circular Única, NOM-024 where applicable.

4. Operational deliverables — not just a score, but a remediation plan with priorities, estimated cost, and timing.

If your report doesn't have all four, it's not an audit — it's an opinion.

The tools rigorous teams use

Technical consensus among serious Microsoft 365 audit teams — visible in forums like r/msp, r/sysadmin, and CISA documentation — converges on a small stack:

1. Microsoft Secure Score (free, native)

For. Feature-adoption metric. Useful for internal month-over-month tracking.

Limit. Relative, not defensible as primary evidence to an auditor.

2. CIS Microsoft 365 Foundations Benchmark v3.0 (free PDF)

For. Minimum-defensible configuration standard with L1 (operational baseline) and L2 (robust security) levels.

Limit. It's a document — evaluation is up to the consumer or a third-party evaluator.

Source: cisecurity.org/benchmark/microsoft_365

3. CISA SCuBA / ScubaGear (free, MIT open-source)

For. Baseline CISA applies to US federal agencies. Policies with stable IDs (`MS.AAD.3.1v1`, `MS.EXO.2.2v2`). Bundles a PowerShell module for automated evaluation.

Limit. Microsoft 365 only — doesn't cover Azure Resource Manager, doesn't cover Mexican regulation.

Source: github.com/cisagov/ScubaGear

4. m365assessment (free, open-source, PowerShell)

For. PowerShell module that scans 100+ settings across Entra, SharePoint, Exchange, Defender, Purview, Teams. Complements SCuBA in areas SCuBA hasn't published yet.

Limit. Community-maintained — update velocity depends on contributors.

Source: github.com/system-admins/m365assessment

5. Maester (free, open-source, Pester-based)

For. Automated test framework for Microsoft 365, unit-testing style. Useful for integrating audit into CI/CD pipelines and detecting configuration drift.

Limit. Learning curve — requires Pester familiarity.

Source: github.com/maester365/maester

6. CIPP (CyberDrain) (free core, self-hostable)

For. Multi-tenant MSP portal. If you manage 10+ tenants it's justifiable; for a single SMB, it's over-engineering.

Source: cipp.app

What none of these cover

No free tool covers Mexican regulation. LFPDPPP Art. 18 ("administrative, technical, and physical security measures"), CNBV Circular Única Art. 168 Bis 11 (3-year retention of critical logs, 10-year immutable incident archive), NOM-024 — mapping the technical control to the regulatory article is human work no US-published open-source tool will do for you.

This is exactly the gap the operational infrastructure category simiriki publishes for the Mexican context fills. The 201-rule library in `packages/scan-core/src/registry.ts` includes explicit rules for AUD-014 (3-year CNBV retention), AUD-015 (10-year CNBV immutable archive), and the DLP-* family mapped to LFPDPPP.

What has to be in the deliverable

A serious audit deliverable has six sections:

1. Executive summary (1 page) — Overall score, critical findings, remediation priorities.

2. Control inventory evaluated — Which baselines, which version, which individual controls. If you can't enumerate the controls, it wasn't an audit.

3. Findings by severity — Each finding with stable ID, description, evidence (what the control evaluated and what it returned), specific remediation.

4. Regulatory mapping — For each applicable framework (LFPDPPP, CNBV, NOM-024, ISO 27001), a control-by-control compliance matrix.

5. Prioritised remediation plan — Concrete changes, estimated cost, dependencies, recommended sequence.

6. Technical appendix — Commands, queries, configurations to apply. Not "enable MFA" — the exact PowerShell or admin-center path.

The deliverable should be forwardable to your board without asking the consultant to interpret it. If you need the consultant for the report to make sense, it's not operational.

Red flags in existing reports

If your team has received an Microsoft 365 audit report in the last 18 months, these are the common problems worth reviewing:

1. Only Secure Score, no baseline to map against. "Your Secure Score is 67%" says nothing about compliance. It's an internal metric, not an external one.

2. Cites "CIS Benchmark" without specifying version or level. v2.x is obsolete. Without L1 vs L2, the compliance number is ambiguous.

3. No mention of SCuBA, ScubaGear, or CPG. Signals the report limited itself to Microsoft-native tools and didn't contrast against federal publishers.

4. No stable control IDs. "Implement MFA for privileged users" is a recommendation; "MS.AAD.3.1v1 (phishing-resistant MFA) currently covers 47/52 privileged accounts" is evidence.

5. No LFPDPPP/CNBV mapping. For a regulated Mexican SMB, this is a functional gap in the deliverable. "International best practices apply" isn't enough.

6. Remediation plan says "work with your IT team". If specific actions aren't in the report, half the work is missing.

Typical cost

For a mid-market SMB in Monterrey, a serious Microsoft 365 audit delivered with the six components above and Mexican regulatory mapping costs, on the market, between MXN $80,000 and $150,000 (custom audit for multiple tenants or hybrid environments with Azure). simiriki delivers the productised single-tenant audit free, no retainer. Any proposal above MXN $300K for a one-time audit (without continuous retainer) requires specific justification — usually means scope includes remediation execution, not just evaluation.

An "audit" that just re-exports your Secure Score, with no regulatory mapping and none of the six components above, is not an audit — regardless of price. What matters is the methodology and the evidence, not the amount invoiced.

How simiriki delivers it

simiriki provides the free scan at /scan with read-only OAuth and the 155 Microsoft Graph rules of the 201-rule library, plus a PDF Posture Brief. The preview typically appears in minutes. The complete report is delivered on a best-effort basis, with a non-guaranteed estimated target of up to 1 hour. The free productised Auditoría adds evaluation against the documented baselines, selected framework mappings, and a prioritised remediation plan. The full methodology with framework calibration and phasing is documented at /metodologia.

Bottom line

A Microsoft 365 audit worth its price is not a technical opinion — it's a systematic evaluation against published baselines with traceable evidence. For a Mexican SMB, the local regulatory context is a non-optional part of the deliverable. If your next report doesn't include SCuBA, CIS L1+L2, mapping to LFPDPPP/CNBV, and an actionable remediation plan — you didn't hire an audit, you hired a PDF.

Related reading:

• ScubaGear: the tool CISA uses to audit Microsoft 365
• The CIS Benchmark for Microsoft 365 explained
• Microsoft Secure Score vs CISA CPG: what each one measures
• simiriki methodology — how the 201 rules are calibrated