Microsoft last night announced a new security solution to help customers strengthen visibility and control across multiple cloud providers, workloads, devices, and digital identities – all in one centralized management interface.
These capabilities include the expansion of Microsoft Defender for Cloud capabilities to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), CloudKnox Permissions Management public preview mode, and new security data analysis capabilities in Microsoft Sentinel.
As businesses adapt and transform by adopting cloud, mobile, and edge platforms, this also raises security concerns.
According to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, 92% of respondents use a multi-cloud model, which means they rely on applications and infrastructure from multiple cloud providers.
Another recent survey sponsored by Microsoft showed that 73% of respondents said managing a multi-cloud environment was challenging.
For organizations to implement this multi-cloud strategy, their security solutions must reduce complexity and provide comprehensive protection.
Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance and Identity at Microsoft, said, “Cyber risk is unavoidable and will continue to grow.”
However, Vasu continued, by building a comprehensive, integrated, and cloud-enabled defense that uses automation to prevent, detect, and mitigate risk, Microsoft can further empower organizations of all sizes not to be afraid to transform and innovate digitally.
"We wanted to provide a comprehensive solution that works seamlessly across multiple platforms, and also reaches out to the cloud and other applications outside our ecosystem, so that our customers can fully secure their digital needs," he added.
Bringing the Future of Multi-cloud
As organizations increasingly embrace multi-cloud strategies, it is critical that the security solutions they deploy reduce complexity and allow them to strengthen their overall security posture – all from one place.
To address this, Microsoft will extend the capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Cloud to GCP.
This is one of Microsoft's steps to protect its customers in various cloud systems.
With GCP support, Microsoft is now the only cloud provider with multi-cloud protection for the industry's top three platforms: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced on Ignite in November 2021, and now GCP.
This support for GCP is complemented by out-of-the-box recommendations that allow customers to configure the GCP environment according to key security standards, such as the Center for Internet Security benchmarks, and protection for critical jobs running on GCP.
This will allow organizations to manage their security centrally and directly across the cloud.
Securing Identity and Strengthening Zero Trust
Identity is the new battlefield for cyberattacks, and managing these key pillars is the foundation of security and compliance.
A multi-cloud world means the number of platforms, devices, users, services, and locations is multiplying exponentially – and organizations often face challenges to secure them.
Microsoft last night announced that it would offer a public preview mode of CloudKnox Permissions Management.
This follows Microsoft's acquisition of CloudKnox Security in 2021, accelerating its ability to help customers manage permissions in their multi-cloud environments and strengthening its Zero Trust security posture.
CloudKnox will assist organizations by providing complete visibility into all user and workload identities of various cloud services with automated features that consistently enforce the lowest privilege access.
Organizations can also perform continuous monitoring powered by machine learning to detect and address suspicious activity.
Reinventing the Data Economy
Microsoft also announced a new way for security teams to access and analyze security data with Microsoft Sentinel as they face evolving cyber threats.
It will transform the economy of working with security information and data event management and offer new ways to access and analyze security data using all types of data, wherever they are available, to provide the most comprehensive threat search solution.
The introduced capabilities include basic logs that allow Microsoft Sentinel to sift through large amounts of data and find high severity threats but low visibility.
Additionally, Microsoft Sentinel will have new data archiving capabilities to extend data retention beyond Microsoft's current policy, from two years to seven years, to support its customers' global data compliance needs.
Microsoft will also add a new search experience to effectively empower security analysts to find threats.
This will be possible thanks to the ability to quickly and easily search for large amounts of security data from all logs, analytics and archives.
Provides Greater Visibility and Control
As cyber-attacks evolve, organizations need to prepare for attacks from inside and outside their network.
Microsoft has also announced several comprehensive solutions that manage security, compliance, identity, endpoint management, and privacy as an integrated whole, while at the same time extending protection across platforms and the cloud:
Secure workload identity with Azure Active Directory (ADD), beyond its core ability to protect user identities, as customers move more workloads to the cloud and develop more applications directly in the cloud.
Secure payment processing with Azure by launching a new service, Azure Payment HSM in public preview mode, for payment card issuers and network and payment processors to securely process payments in the cloud.
Azure Payment HSM service offers the highest level of protection for cryptographic keys and customer PINs for secure payment transactions.