Your IT team spent 14 hours last week chasing MFA gaps, reviewing stale accounts, and pulling compliance reports by hand. That is 14 hours burned on tasks that a properly configured Microsoft 365 tenant handles automatically. The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report found that financial institutions paid $6.08 million per breach in 2025. Most of those breaches started with the exact gaps your team spent those 14 hours trying to close.
The problem is not a lack of effort. It is a lack of automation. Mortgage lenders, credit unions, and banks run security workflows built on manual processes, disconnected tools, and tribal knowledge. When someone leaves, the process leaves with them.
ABT's Guardian operating model changes this. Guardian wraps around your Microsoft 365 tenant with automated hardening, continuous monitoring, and nightly risk scans that surface the work your team needs to do. Not more alerts. Fewer alerts, better prioritized, with clear next steps attached.
A five-person IT shop at a mid-size mortgage lender handles licensing, device management, compliance reporting, user provisioning, and security monitoring. Those are five full-time jobs compressed into five people who also answer help desk tickets.
Manual workflows break in predictable ways:
Each of these problems compounds. A stale account with no MFA that triggers a Defender alert nobody sees is not a theoretical risk. It is the exact sequence that leads to a $6 million breach.
Guardian is not a dashboard you log into once a quarter. It is an operating model that runs every night, scanning your tenant for drift, gaps, and risks. ABT's security operations team reviews the output every morning. Your IT team gets a prioritized list of what to fix, not a wall of raw data.
Every night, Guardian pulls data from Entra ID, Intune, Defender, and Purview. It checks for:
These scans do not generate alerts in the traditional sense. They generate findings. Each finding includes the affected user or device, the specific risk, and the recommended remediation step. Your team opens a report, not a firehose.
Microsoft Secure Score gives you a number. Guardian gives you a story. ABT targets 90% or higher across all four Secure Score categories: Identity, Data, Devices, and Apps.
Most mortgage lenders ABT onboards start between 35% and 55%. That gap between current state and target is the work plan. Guardian breaks it into specific actions ranked by impact. Block legacy authentication first. It stops 99% of password spray attacks according to Microsoft's own data. Then enforce MFA registration completion. Then address device compliance.
Each action shows the expected Secure Score improvement before you implement it. No guessing. No wasted effort on low-impact changes while high-risk gaps remain open.
The FFIEC retired its Cybersecurity Assessment Tool in August 2025 and directed financial institutions to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. The NCUA released an updated Automated Cybersecurity Evaluation Tool (ACET) aligned with the same framework. For mortgage lenders, the FTC Safeguards Rule and GLBA remain the floor.
Guardian produces compliance evidence as a byproduct of its nightly operations. When your auditor or examiner asks for proof that:
You do not build that evidence package from scratch. Guardian already has it. The data exists in the same reports your team uses every morning.
Guardian operates on a continuous loop: Harden, Monitor, Insight, Respond. This is not a one-time project. It is the operating rhythm for your tenant security.
ABT configures your Microsoft 365 tenant to a hardened baseline. Conditional Access policies enforce MFA. Intune manages devices. Legacy authentication gets blocked. DLP policies protect sensitive borrower data. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC prevent email spoofing.
This is not a settings dump. Each policy is configured for your institution's specific needs. A mortgage lender with 200 loan officers needs different device compliance rules than a credit union with 50 tellers.
Guardian monitors your tenant continuously for drift. Policies get modified. New users bypass enrollment. Devices fall out of compliance. Monitoring catches these changes before they become incidents.
ABT's team reviews monitoring data daily. Your team sees a filtered view of what requires their attention. The 500 events that resolved themselves overnight do not appear in your queue.
Raw monitoring data becomes prioritized intelligence. Guardian's security insights surface sign-in anomalies, MFA coverage gaps, external sharing exposure, and license utilization patterns. Productivity insights (a paid add-on) show which licenses your institution is actually using versus paying for.
Cyber insurance carriers now factor Microsoft Secure Score into underwriting decisions. Demonstrating a high score in MFA and data protection can lower your premiums. Guardian gives you the data to prove your posture during renewal conversations.
When a finding requires action, Guardian provides the specific remediation steps. Not a generic recommendation to "improve your security posture." A specific instruction: disable this account, enroll this device, modify this policy exclusion.
For incidents that require ABT's direct involvement, the response path is already established. ABT has access to your tenant as your managed service provider. There is no vendor onboarding delay when a real threat appears.
Mortgage lenders who adopt Guardian see measurable changes fast. Here is the typical timeline:
Week 1-2: Baseline assessment. Guardian scans the tenant and produces a full risk inventory. Most institutions discover 15-30 findings they did not know existed. Stale accounts from employees who left years ago. Devices running Windows versions that are no longer supported. MFA registrations that were never completed.
Week 3-4: Hardening sprint. ABT configures Conditional Access, enables Intune enrollment, blocks legacy authentication, and deploys DLP policies. Secure Score typically jumps 20-30 points during this phase.
Month 2: Monitoring and tuning. Guardian enters continuous monitoring. The initial spike of findings decreases as the hardened baseline takes hold. Your team begins working from the prioritized daily report instead of reactive alerts.
Month 3: Steady state. The daily report shrinks to a handful of items. Your Secure Score stabilizes above 80% and trends toward 90%. Compliance evidence is available on demand. Your IT team spends their time on strategic projects instead of manual security hygiene.
Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30% year over year. Shadow AI tools added $670,000 to breach costs. The average time to detect and contain a breach dropped to 241 days, but that is still eight months of exposure.
For a mortgage lender holding borrower Social Security numbers, bank account data, and employment records, a breach is not just a fine. It is a CFPB investigation. It is a state regulatory action. It is borrower notification letters and credit monitoring costs. It is reputational damage that takes years to recover from.
The mortgage industry cannot afford the manual approach anymore. Regulators are watching. Insurance carriers are scoring. Borrowers are asking questions.
ABT is a cloud-first managed service provider and Tier-1 Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider. That combination matters for security workflows because ABT has direct access to Microsoft's engineering support and premier support channels.
ABT's entire stack is Microsoft-native: Entra ID, Intune, Defender, Conditional Access, Purview, and Sentinel. No ConnectWise. No Kaseya. No SolarWinds. When those third-party MSP platforms suffer breaches (ConnectWise ScreenConnect in February 2024, Kaseya VSA in July 2021), ABT's clients have zero exposure.
ABT serves 750+ financial institutions. That scale means the Guardian team has seen every configuration mistake, every compliance gap, and every audit question your institution will face. Your problems are not unique. The solutions are proven.
Conditional Access: Microsoft Entra ID feature that enforces access policies based on user, device, location, and risk level. Required for GLBA and FTC Safeguards Rule compliance in mortgage lending.
Microsoft Secure Score: A numerical representation of an organization's security posture across Identity, Data, Devices, and Apps categories. Scored 0-100%. ABT targets 90%+ for all managed tenants.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0: The updated federal framework for managing cybersecurity risk, now the primary reference after FFIEC retired its Cybersecurity Assessment Tool in August 2025.
Legacy Authentication: Older authentication protocols (IMAP, SMTP, POP3) that do not support MFA. Microsoft reports that 99% of password spray attacks target legacy auth. Blocking it is the single highest-impact Secure Score action.
Intune: Microsoft's endpoint management platform that enforces device compliance policies. Ensures only managed, up-to-date devices can access your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Guardian runs nightly automated scans across Entra ID, Intune, Defender, and Purview to detect MFA gaps, stale accounts, unmanaged devices, and policy drift. Each finding includes the affected resource and specific remediation steps, delivered as a prioritized daily report rather than raw alert data.
ABT targets 90% or higher across all four Secure Score categories: Identity, Data, Devices, and Apps. Most financial institutions start between 35% and 55% when onboarding. Guardian breaks the gap into prioritized actions ranked by impact, starting with blocking legacy authentication and completing MFA enrollment.
The FFIEC retired its Cybersecurity Assessment Tool in August 2025 and directed institutions to NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. The NCUA released an updated ACET aligned with the same framework. Guardian produces compliance evidence mapped to these frameworks as a byproduct of its nightly monitoring operations.
No. ABT runs a pure Microsoft technology stack plus its own Guardian tooling. ABT does not use ConnectWise, Kaseya, SolarWinds, or any third-party MSP platform. When those platforms suffer breaches, ABT clients have zero exposure. The entire security stack is Microsoft-native: Entra ID, Intune, Defender, and Purview.
Guardian produces evidence aligned with GLBA, FTC Safeguards Rule, NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, and state regulations like NYDFS cybersecurity requirements. For credit unions, it maps to NCUA ACET standards. For banks, it aligns with FFIEC examination handbook requirements and OCC guidance.
Your IT team has better things to do than export spreadsheets and chase MFA enrollment reminders. Guardian automates the security workflow so your team can focus on the work that actually moves your institution forward.
Talk to an ABT security specialist about automating your tenant security operations.