Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Technical

Integrating advanced capabilities to safeguard against cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a robust cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) designed to secure cloud-based applications against diverse cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

This comprehensive security solution integrates advanced capabilities to provide unparalleled protection for your cloud environments. By unifying security management across multi-cloud and multiple-pipeline environments, Defender for Cloud ensures that security is embedded early in the development lifecycle, safeguarding your code and infrastructure from the outset.

It offers Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) to prevent breaches and provides actionable recommendations to enhance security. With Cloud Workload Protection (CWP), it delivers specific protections and immediate alerts for your workloads. Integration with Microsoft Defender XDR further strengthens your security posture by correlating alerts across various resources. Microsoft Defender for Cloud empowers you to proactively secure your applications and infrastructure, ensuring a resilient defence against cyber threats.

By utilising Microsoft Defender for Cloud, you can ensure that your applications are secure at the code, infrastructure, and runtime levels, thus hardening them against various attacks and improving the overall security of your cloud and on-premises resources.

Key Capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Cloud

DevSecOps Integration

Unified Security Management: Defender for Cloud offers a development security operations (DevSecOps) solution that consolidates security management at the code level across multi-cloud and multiple-pipeline environments.

Early Security Practices: By incorporating security measures early in the software development process, you can protect your code management environments and pipelines. This ensures that security is built into the development lifecycle from the start.

DevOps Security Management: Gain insights into your development environment’s security posture from a single location, empowering security teams to manage DevOps security across diverse pipeline environments.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Preventive Actions: Defender for Cloud includes CSPM capabilities that highlight actions to prevent breaches and secure your environment.

Recommendations: The platform provides recommendations to improve the security of your cloud and on-premises resources by ensuring proper configuration and deployment.

Advanced CSPM Plan: Foundational CSPM capabilities are available for free, with the option to enable advanced features through the Defender CSPM plan.

Cloud Workload Protection (CWP)

Specific Protections: Defender for Cloud includes a cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) that offers specific protections for servers, containers, storage, databases, and other workloads.

Security Controls: It provides workload-specific recommendations and security controls to protect your workloads from threats.

Immediate Alerts: In case of a threat, the platform generates security alerts that indicate the nature and severity of the threat, enabling you to respond quickly and mitigate risks.

Integration with Microsoft Defender XDR

Enabling Microsoft Defender for Cloud grants you automatic access to Microsoft Defender XDR. This extended detection and response platform enhances security by correlating alerts and incidents across cloud resources, devices, and identities. The Microsoft 365 Defender portal assists security teams in investigating attacks, offering a comprehensive overview of suspicious and malicious events within cloud environments.