If you aren't familiar with Microsoft Azure, it is an infrastructure and cloud-computing platform made for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. Recently, the billion-dollar company announced that their Azure is going to be more secure with implementations of Azure Advanced Threat Detection, Active Directory Identify Protection, as well as Customer Lockbox. This is the latest news on the Release Dates of these features.
Information Week reports that Microsoft has announced new capabilities for its Azure Security Center and new cloud app security in response to CEO Satya Nadella's call for tighter enterprise security. Nadella wanted a new approach for enterprise security in a cloud-based world, as employees increasingly access corporate data with their own personal devices and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. Nadella called for introducing security at all endpoints from sensors to datacenters and beyond.
This Azure Security Center is a new security management with reporting options, and it is made to deliver advanced threat detection abilities as well as a centralized security management system. Venture Beat reports that a new service called Advanced Threat Detection for the Azure Security Center is going to make that even better. Advanced Threat Detection automatically collects information from crash events, analyzes it, and then notifies users when a virtual machine of theirs might be compromised. It will also configure a security policy for a resource group so that the policy can be based on specific workload needs.
Bret Arsenault, Microsoft's chief information security officer, wrote in a recent blog post saying "After years of examining crash dumps that our customers opted to send to Microsoft from more than a billion PCs worldwide, Microsoft has developed the capability to analyze this data to effectively detect compromised systems because crashes are often the result of failed exploitation attempts and brittle malware."
Arsenault also said that Microsoft isn't the only one working on Azure Security Center, as in the coming weeks Azure is going to make room for add-ons and third party vendors. Microsoft recently acquired the cloud security startup Adallom, and it could monitor usage to discover things that could be threatening.
In fact, Microsoft rolled out its Azure Active Directory Identify Protection, which is going to be available for public preview this week. The Active Directory is designed to detect suspicious activities and privileged identities for end-users, based not only on brute force attacks, infected devices, leaked credentials, and unfamiliar sign-in locations that are encountered by the business, and also on the security signals that come to Microsoft from 14 billion logins.
Another feature is an extension of a Customer Lockbox limiting what Microsoft employees can do with the end user's data. This tool is planned to be available for consumers in the second quarter of 2016.
