In September, the company agreed to acquire rival security software maker Good Technology for $425 million. IT teams can visualise the attacks on an interactive map to find attack patterns. Azure Active Directory Identity Protection builds on these results and detects suspicious activities for end users and privileged identities based on signals like brute force attacks, leaked credentials, sign ins from unfamiliar locations and infected devices. Crash events are automatically collected from Azure virtual machines.
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Microsoft touts Azure Security Center’s new security management and reporting options, and rolls out new cloud app security.
BlackBerry has launched new cybersecurity consulting services and tools combined with its existing security solutions to help customers identify the latest threat and develop mitigation strategies based on risk.
These capabilities have been integrated into Azure Security Centre, which offers advanced threat detection for customers hosting virtual machines in Microsoft Azure. IT will also be able to approve and revoke permissions to third-party applications that users are authorised to connect to the Office 365 environment. BES12 from BlackBerry implements Good Secure EMM suites to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft is not trying to provide all the security capabilities for Azure and Office 365 applications on its own. The future will bring more collaboration between the two companies due to considerable enterprise customer overlap, according to BlackBerry.
Microsoft’s chief information security officer Bret Arsenault said the new functionality comes after chief executive officer Satya Nadella called for a “new approach” to be taken to security last November. Customers can now configure security policies for resource groups instead for an entire subscription base. The tool analyzes more than 14 billion user logins a day to detect suspicious activity and calculate a user’s risk severity. The Azure Security Center itself will alert users when a next-generation firewall is recommended.
Further, BlackBerry and Microsoft plan to add network crisis communication solution from AtHoc into Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace.
Better reporting and auditAll the security enhancements require better reporting and audit capabilities, so Microsoft expanded security management in Azure Security Center. This feature will enhance the process of consumer approval, as well as give additional transparency in scenarios where a Microsoft engineer is required to access data and accounts of Office 365 to troubleshoot issues. The abilities include security notification which will alert administrators of any mistrustful activity in the service.
Customer Lockbox for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business will be available around the same time.
Microsoft has added a new Power BI Dashboard to allow customers to better visualize, analyze and filter security alerts from any of their systems and devices in order to discover possible attack patterns and trends. The new features include authentication events, an improved dashboard, system updates and malware incidents. Check Point vSEC is already available, and options from Cisco Systems, Fortinet and Imperva will follow soon.
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“No single company can solve the security challenges that our customers face today, which is why the security ecosystem and all of our security partners are key to our approach”, said Arsenault.
