---
title: Why 1Security
description: Access permissions are the #1 attack vector in modern cybersecurity. 1Security is the identity-and-permission forensic platform that answers who has access to what - and what they did with it - on standard Microsoft 365 licenses.
icon: Compass
---
# Why 1Security
## Attackers don't break in anymore. They log in.
The vast majority of today's breaches are not sophisticated malware slipping past a firewall - they are **identity and permission attacks**. Attackers exploit overshared data, dormant accounts, rogue AI agents, and unmanaged shadow devices, moving through your environment along the _exact same access pathways your employees use_. There's no exploit to patch and no signature to match - just a valid login doing things it shouldn't.
Cybercrime evolved from vulnerabilities to permissions. Most security tooling didn't.
### The Invisible Attack Vector
**Access permissions are the #1 attack vector** of successful cybercrime and
AI data leaks - and the surface almost no tool actually watches.
## The tooling landscape completely failed to evolve
Despite the shift, legacy tools are stuck in the past:
- **SIEMs & Data Lakes** extort organizations into storing "dead logs" for compliance, but lack the contextual intelligence to catch a threat in real time.
- **IAM & Directory tools** manage provisioning, but are completely blind to what identities are actually _doing_ with your data - or which unmanaged devices they're doing it from.
- **Static compliance scanners** produce point-in-time dashboards that are obsolete the moment they're exported, leaving teams drowning in alerts they can't act on.
The result: security teams flying blind, manually stitching cryptic audit trails across fragmented systems just to answer one deceptively simple question - **"Who has access to what, and what did they do with it?"**
1Security is built to answer it.
## Measure what matters. Act on what you measure.
The old management adage holds in security too: **you can't improve what you can't measure**. Legacy tools give you either raw logs without intelligence or static dashboards without context. 1Security turns your live Microsoft 365 data into measured, ranked, trended intelligence - and then lets you act on it in the same interface.
- **Savings you can quantify** - every dormant license, abandoned app, and orphaned site is a cost line you can measure and reclaim. Not "you might have waste" - a ranked list of exactly what's unused and for how long.
- **Time to action** - from "who has access to what?" taking days of manual stitching across systems to minutes. From detecting a mass-download spike to alerting in as little as one hour. From finding a risk to remediating it without leaving the screen.
- **Data-driven decisions** - every finding, every trend, every alert is backed by measured activity data, not assumptions. You're acting on evidence: real usage numbers, real permission states, real activity timelines.
- **Available now** - same-day deployment on standard Microsoft 365 licenses. No SIEM contract, no professional services engagement, no multi-month implementation. First scan results arrive before the day is over.
Six questions every security team gets asked and can't answer from native Microsoft 365 tooling - each turned into minutes of work, on a standard license.
## 1. The Identity-Attack Forensic Tool
> _Did somebody steal our data - and exactly what was affected?_
A new category of tool for a threat the old ones can't see.
- **Proactive anomaly & insider-threat alerting** - active defense, not post-breach autopsy. High-signal alerts for tenant-wide risks, sudden mass downloads, and anomalous access catch compromised accounts and insiders in real time. See [Activities](/en/docs/screens/activities).
- **3-year forensic memory without the log-storage tax** - storing logs is expensive even with tools that add no intelligence on top. 1Security retains up to **three years** of [activity history](/en/docs/screens/activity-logs) out of the box, on standard licenses.
- **12 hours to 10 minutes** - answer definitively _"is this a breach, or normal behavior?"_ and chart the exact blast radius of a compromised account.
- **Shadow Devices & Shadow Locations** - automatically surface unmanaged [endpoints touching your data](/en/docs/screens/devices) and anomalous, previously-unseen access origins - with [Microsoft's own backend IPs filtered out](/en/docs/location) so real anomalies aren't buried in false positives.
- **Contextual enrichment vs. cryptic logs** - turn raw, unreadable audit events into a unified timeline that attributes every action to the exact **Actor, Resource, App, Device, and Location**.
- **Unmasking the insider threats traditional tooling misses** - most successful breaches never trip a single alarm: an email quietly forwarded to an unknown recipient, an unknown device signing in with a stolen employee token, data accessed from an unexpected location, activity patterns just slightly off the norm. To traditional tooling, every one of those events looks completely legitimate. 1Security correlates **Actor, Device, Location, and behavior** across the full activity timeline to expose the attack hiding inside "normal" events.
## 2. The Data & Permission Crystal Ball
> _Who has access to what - and why?_
Another new category: permission visibility at every altitude.
- **From bird's-eye to single detail** - zoom seamlessly from a tenant-wide view of permission creep down to a single risk. Not just _"which financial files are available to AI?"_ but _"exactly why does this specific user and this specific AI have access to this one file?"_ See the [Permission Graph](/en/docs/permission-graph).
- **The ultimate access map** - map where data lives, who (humans, service accounts) can reach it, what AI and apps can read it, and where your real sensitivity risks are concentrated across [Files](/en/docs/screens/files), [Sites](/en/docs/screens/sites), and [Groups](/en/docs/screens/groups).
- **Oversharing & exposure profiling** - spot widely-available sensitive data before it leaks, and reveal the hidden pathways normal directory logs miss: dormant public links, over-permissioned folders, unauthorized routes.
- **Security-measure verification** - see the true, real-time coverage of controls you already pay for, like [Microsoft Purview labels](/en/docs/screens/sensitivity-labels). Know instantly what's tagged and what's exposed.
- **Audit-ready compliance & reporting** - frameworks like [NIS2](/en/docs/nis2), ISO 27001, and SOC 2 demand continuous evidence of who can access what and what's done with the data. With black-box permission models, producing that evidence is slow and costly - and every report is outdated the moment it's generated, because data ecosystems never stop changing. 1Security draws reporting straight from the live permission and activity map, so it's always current.
## 3. Total Hygiene & Attack-Surface Cleanup
> _Are we wasting budget and hoarding hidden risks?_
Every stale account and forgotten resource is both a cost line and an attack path. 1Security finds both in one pass.
- **Zero-waste IT** - reclaim budget by finding [unused licenses](/en/docs/screens/licenses), [dormant apps](/en/docs/screens/apps), inactive users, abandoned mailboxes, and orphaned sites.
- **Attack-surface cleanup** - eliminate stale, orphaned, and disabled [devices](/en/docs/screens/devices), and sever lingering access for offboarded employees before it becomes an insider threat or breach vector.
- **AI context-window optimization** - declutter the data footprint so corporate AI like Copilot doesn't hallucinate on outdated junk or surface sensitive executive documents to regular employees.
## 4. Shadow AI, Shadow IT & Autonomous Agents
> _What AI tools and third-party apps are secretly reading our data?_
Employees consent to OAuth apps and build agents in an afternoon; IT finds out at the incident review.
- **Shadow AI discovery** - catch rogue AI tools and unvetted third-party [apps](/en/docs/screens/apps) that employees quietly connect to corporate data.
- **Safe AI guardrails** - establish bulletproof data-access boundaries and clean up permissions _before_ rolling out enterprise AI, so every [agent](/en/docs/screens/agents) operates only within authorized limits.
## 5. Instant Ecosystem-Wide Remediation
> _How do we immediately fix the vulnerabilities we just found?_
- **From dashboards to control** - move past read-only. Safely revoke, grant, or update permissions - from a tenant-wide oversharing fix down to [removing one user's access to a single file](/en/docs/screens/files) - across the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem, right from the 1Security interface.
- **Strict opt-in write model** - the platform runs read-only until you deliberately enable remediation, so granting write access is a controlled decision, never a leap of faith.
## 6. The Measurement & Benchmarking Engine
> _Are we getting better or worse - and how do we know?_
Management asks for numbers. Security teams deliver narratives. 1Security closes that gap with measured, trended, benchmarkable intelligence - the kind C-level needs for board reporting, budget decisions, and risk-posture tracking.
- **Usage & adoption tracking** - who is actually using Copilot, which agents are active vs abandoned, which sites are thriving vs going quiet. Real adoption numbers, not survey guesses. See [Activities](/en/docs/screens/activities).
- **Cost intelligence** - license-utilization rates, dormant-app spend, orphaned-site storage costs. Every dollar of Microsoft 365 spend, accounted for and ranked by waste.
- **Risk posture over time** - is your exposure shrinking or growing? Track permission-creep trends, oversharing velocity, and sensitive-data exposure as they evolve - not as a point-in-time snapshot, but as a direction.
- **Time-to-detect and time-to-remediate** - measure how quickly your team catches and closes risks. Sub-hour detection windows for active threats, same-session remediation for found exposures.
- **Board-ready benchmarks** - ranked, sparklined, and exportable. _Top downloaders this week. Unused apps this quarter. Most-shared files this month._ The numbers that matter, always current, always shareable.
## Built to be affordable
All of this runs on **standard Microsoft 365 licenses**. [Sensitivity scanning](/en/docs/sensitivity) doesn't need E5 or Purview. [Location intelligence](/en/docs/location) doesn't need premium sign-in logs. Three-year retention doesn't need a SIEM contract. The pattern is deliberate: elite visibility priced like a utility, not like a data lake.
Ready to see it on your own tenant? Start with the [installation
guide](/en/docs/installation) - first scan results arrive the same day. If
NIS2 is on your desk, jump to [NIS2 Readiness](/en/docs/nis2).