Essential Eight Uplift (ACSC) — Australia

Essential Eight Uplift

Practical, auditable uplift across the ACSC Essential Eight — prioritised by risk, business impact, and automation opportunity within your Microsoft 365 & Azure environments. We benchmark your current maturity, implement controls, and capture audit-ready evidence.

Application control Patch management Macro control User hardening MFA Restrict admin Logging & monitoring Backups

Why the Essential Eight matters

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) recommends the Essential Eight to mitigate the most common cyber threats, including ransomware. Government and many regulated industries require uplift to defined maturity levels. We align uplift with your ISMS (ISO 27001) and ISM expectations so you get one coherent program — not competing frameworks.

Mandatory & expected

Adopted across agencies and critical suppliers; increasingly required in contracts.

Aligned to ISO & ISM

Maps cleanly to Annex A controls and ISM hardening requirements.

Reduces breach risk

Targets the highest-impact mitigations for real-world attacks.

Deliverables

Current → Target maturity

Evidence-based assessment against ML0–ML3, gap analysis, and a risk-prioritised roadmap that balances speed, impact and cost.

Maturity scorecard per strategy
Quick wins & dependency map
Executive summary pack

Control implementation

Pragmatic uplift mapped to Microsoft 365, Azure and endpoints — Intune baselines, Defender hardening, application control and admin reduction.

Intune: device compliance, encryption, baselines
Defender: ASR rules, EDR, attack surface
Application control (WDAC/AppLocker)

Audit-ready evidence

Repeatable test scripts, exports and screenshots stored in SharePoint with retention & versioning. Easy to hand to auditors or IRAP assessors.

PowerShell/Graph exports on cadence
Monitoring & exception registers
Before/after artefact packs

The eight strategies

Application control

WDAC/AppLocker policies, exceptions & testing.

Patch applications

Automated patching SLAs & reporting.

Configure macros

Block/allow by risk; signed macro enforcement.

User hardening

Attack surface reduction & browser hardening.

Restrict admin

Least privilege, PAM and break-glass controls.

Multi-factor auth

Conditional Access, phishing-resistant options.

Patch operating systems

Intune rings, deferrals and compliance gates.

Regular backups

Immutable storage, restore tests & runbooks.

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