Securing Your Cloud Journey: Exploring Microsoft Cloud Security Tools and Features

?As organizations embrace their journey into the cloud, it is also necessary for them to keep their data secure. Even though organizations migrate into the cloud, often across industries, we see hybrid cloud environments. An example could be that an organization could have its active directory as Microsoft Entra (formerly known as Microsoft Active Directory), but server workloads could be on Prem or it could be a virtual machine in Vmware. It is important to secure data across workloads to keep organizations secure. In today's post, let us explore the Microsoft cloud security tools and features available for organizations across the globe.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud:

Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a valuable addition for organizations as it provides real-time protection and serves as cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection management. The Defender can be extended to non-Azure premises as well, like AWS, Google Cloud,? and Prem, with the help of Azure Arc. Azure Arc makes non-Azure premises monitor or make them report to the Azure platform, thereby enabling monitoring and securing them via Defender or Sentinel.

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• Cloud security posture management: Cloud security posture management provides the overall security posture of an organization with a secure score. Any secure score above 80 is considered to be a safe way to say that an organization is secure in its overall security posture. CSPM includes features like misconfigurations, threats, misuse, and compliance violations across multiple cloud environments.?
• Cloud Workload Protection: Cloud workload protection makes life easier for SOC analysts as it alerts us to any potential suspicious activities and gives us insights on the remediation of threats.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers various features, like Defender for servers, where it protects endpoints (user laptops, servers, etc.) from real-time threats and alerts security teams about potential suspicious activity within the environment. Defender for Endpoint detects threats and alerts in Defender for Cloud Console or M365 Defender Console. Also, it protects against SQL-related threats, storage accounts, etc.

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Microsoft 365 Defender:

?The Defender 365 product suite protects four areas:

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• Defender for Endpoint: Defender for Endpoint alerts or remediates any potential suspicious activities.and once it detects it, it reports an alert in the Microsoft 365 Defender console, which is accessible via?https://security.microsoft.com.?
• Defender for Office 365: Defender for Office 365 provides EOP (exchange online protection) and Microsoft-based SaaS apps like SharePoint, Teams,etc. It mainly focuses on email security by offering various features like anti-phishing policies, safe attachment policies, safe attachments for one drive, SharePoint, and teams, safe link policies, ZAP protection, etc.
• Defender for cloud apps: It is also called defender for cloud app security and provides enhanced protection for apps like app governance, app visibility, protecting sensitive information via DLP, alerts for any unusual data upload or download, alerts for any suspicious apps downloaded by users, etc.
• Defender for Identity Protection: Defender for Identity Protection protects the prem active directory from threats and suspicious activities and alerts for any lateral movement paths in the Defender 365 console. Defender for AAD identity protection protects Azure Active Directory with the help of various signals and protects against advanced threats.
• Defender for vulnerability management: Defender for vulnerability management provides the latest information on recent vulnerabilities detected and also alerts for any vulnerability exploitation with the help of alert signals. Microsoft 365 Defender provides a unified threat management service that can be viewed and actioned on a single console.
• Defender for Threat Intelligence: Defender for TI often provides the latest IOCs based on geography along with the threat actor's name. It also provides visibility for any alerts that were detected based on threat intelligence feeds across devices in organizations.

Conclusion:

In recent times, Microsoft Azure Cloud has had a market share on par with Amazon Web Services Cloud. Microsoft Defender keeps getting better with its newer release versions. It also introduced Microsoft Defender XDR, which provides unified threat management for organizations and also helps security analysts by cross-correlating events from SIEM to provide better visibility. The Microsoft security team has also introduced Copilot and generative AI solutions that help incident response teams minimize the mean time to detect and the mean time to respond and remediate.

Guarding Your Cloud Frontier: Unveiling Microsoft's Arsenal of Cloud Security Tools ????

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Ganesh Kannan

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