Secure Future Initiative

Principles

Microsoft Secure Future Initiative

Three principles anchor our approach to the Secure Future Initiative (SFI). We’re continuously applying what we’ve learned from incidents to improve our methods and practices, ensuring that security is paramount in everything we create and provide.

Foundations of SFI

Successful business operations and change management are predicated on people, process, and technology working in harmony. These are the foundations of SFI.

A group of people sitting around a table

Security-first culture

Culture is reinforced through daily behaviors. Regular meetings between engineering executive vice presidents, SFI leaders, and all management levels ensure bottom-up, end-to-end problem-solving that ingrains security thinking into our everyday actions.

Security governance

We're elevating security governance with a new framework led by the chief information security officer. This will introduce a partnership with engineering teams to oversee SFI, manage risks, and report progress to leadership.

Continuous security improvement

SFI empowers every employee at Microsoft to prioritize security, driven by a growth mindset of continuous improvement. We integrate feedback and learnings from incidents into our standards, enabling secure design and operations at scale.

Paved paths and standards

Paved paths are best practices that optimize productivity, compliance, and security. These become standards when they enhance security or the developer experience. With SFI, we set and measure standards across all six prioritized security pillars.

SFI pillars

Each of SFI’s six prioritized security pillars has goals and actions that provide visibility into the details of our execution.

Explore the progress

Discover the ways SFI has already made progress.

Read the latest report

The Microsoft Secure Future Initiative, launched in November of 2023, is a multiyear commitment that advances the way we design, build, test, and operate our Microsoft technology to ensure that our solutions meet the highest possible standards for security.
Microsoft launched SFI to prepare for the increasing scale and high stakes of cyberattacks. SFI brings together every part of Microsoft to advance cybersecurity protection across our company and products. We carefully considered what we saw across Microsoft and what we heard from customers, governments, and partners to identify our greatest opportunities to impact the future of security.
We plan to keep ourselves accountable and keep our customers, partners, and the security community updated on SFI through regular updates.