The first thing to break is not Microsoft itself—it’s the operational baseline. Small teams often inherit years of default settings, one-off policies, and undocumented exceptions. The environment works until it doesn’t, and then the lack of standardization makes recovery slow.
The second weak point is identity. Accounts get over-permissioned, MFA policies are inconsistent, and admin access stays always-on. Those gaps don’t always trigger alerts, but they create persistent risk. When something goes wrong, there is rarely a clean path to recovery.
Endpoint configuration is next. Devices drift, patch timelines stretch, and compliance becomes a suggestion rather than a requirement. That drift snowballs, and small problems become large support costs.
We see the same pattern repeatedly: stability is lost when there isn’t a clear, enforced baseline. Fixing that baseline and keeping it stable prevents most future failures.
—Skynarc’s view on baseline drift and stability.