When you open Defender for Cloud in the Azure portal for the first time or if you enable it through the API, Defender for Cloud is enabled for free on all your Azure subscriptions. Defender for Cloud provides foundational cloud security and posture management (CSPM) features by default. The foundational CSPM includes, secure score, security policy and basic recommendations, and network security assessment to help you protect your Azure resources.
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Multicloud security - Connect your accounts from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to protect resources and workloads on those platforms with a range of Microsoft Defender for Cloud security features.
Track compliance with a range of standards - Defender for Cloud continuously assesses your hybrid cloud environment to analyze the risk factors according to the controls and best practices in Microsoft cloud security benchmark. When you enable the enhanced security features, you can apply a range of other industry standards, regulatory standards, and benchmarks according to your organization's needs. Add standards and track your compliance with them from the regulatory compliance dashboard.
The free offering from Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers the secure score and related tools. Enabling enhanced security turns on all of the Microsoft Defender plans to provide a range of security benefits for all your resources in Azure, hybrid, and multicloud environments.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) for all of your Azure, on-premises, and multicloud (Amazon AWS and Google GCP) resources. Defender for Cloud fills three vital needs as you manage the security of your resources and workloads in the cloud and on-premises:
Generates a secure score for your subscriptions based on an assessment of your connected resources compared with the guidance in Microsoft cloud security benchmark. Use the score to understand your security posture, and the compliance dashboard to review your compliance with the built-in benchmark. When you've enabled the enhanced security features, you can customize the standards used to assess your compliance, and add other regulations (such as NIST and Azure CIS) or organization-specific security requirements. You can also apply recommendations, and score based on the AWS Foundational Security Best practices standards.
Provides hardening recommendations based on any identified security misconfigurations and weaknesses. Use these security recommendations to strengthen the security posture of your organization's Azure, hybrid, and multicloud resources.
Analyze and secure your attack paths through the cloud security graph, which is a graph-based context engine that exists within Defender for Cloud. The cloud security graph collects data from your multicloud environment and other data sources. For example, the cloud assets inventory, connections and lateral movement possibilities between resources, exposure to internet, permissions, network connections, vulnerabilities and more. The data collected is then used to build a graph representing your multicloud environment.
Attack path analysis is a graph-based algorithm that scans the cloud security graph. The scans expose exploitable paths that attackers may use to breach your environment to reach your high-impact assets. Attack path analysis exposes those attack paths and suggests recommendations as to how best remediate the issues that will break the attack path and prevent successful breach.
Defender for Cloud offers security alerts that are powered by Microsoft Threat Intelligence. It also includes a range of advanced, intelligent, protections for your workloads. The workload protections are provided through Microsoft Defender plans specific to the types of resources in your subscriptions. For example, you can enable Microsoft Defender for Storage to get alerted about suspicious activities related to your storage resources.
When necessary, Defender for Cloud can automatically deploy a Log Analytics agent to gather security-related data. For Azure machines, deployment is handled directly. For hybrid and multicloud environments, Microsoft Defender plans are extended to non Azure machines with the help of Azure Arc. CSPM features are extended to multicloud machines without the need for any agents (see Defend resources running on other clouds).
Review the findings from these vulnerability scanners and respond to them all from within Defender for Cloud. This broad approach brings Defender for Cloud closer to being the single pane of glass for all of your cloud security efforts.
It's a security basic to know and make sure your workloads are secure, and it starts with having tailored security policies in place. Because policies in Defender for Cloud are built on top of Azure Policy controls, you're getting the full range and flexibility of a world-class policy solution. In Defender for Cloud, you can set your policies to run on management groups, across subscriptions, and even for a whole tenant.
Defender for Cloud continuously discovers new resources that are being deployed across your workloads and assesses whether they're configured according to security best practices. If not, they're flagged and you get a prioritized list of recommendations for what you need to fix. Recommendations help you reduce the attack surface across each of your resources.
The list of recommendations is enabled and supported by the Microsoft cloud security benchmark. This Microsoft-authored benchmark, based on common compliance frameworks, began with Azure and now provides a set of guidelines for security and compliance best practices for multiple cloud environments. Learn more in Microsoft cloud security benchmark introduction.
Security is the #1 cloud challenge. The rate and pace of change in business models and adoption of new cloud-based enterprise platforms has never been greater. Combine that with the increasingly dynamic nature of workloads and traditional security tools have been left in the dust.
Bitdefender delivers a purpose-built solution to address the unique requirements of server workload protection and cloud-native application security, delivering high-performance cloud workload security (CWS) and automation through comprehensive integrations. It helps address environment sprawl with consolidated security management across hybrid, multi-cloud environments, Linux, Windows, and containers.
With datacenter security solutions from Bitdefender, you can protect your servers and virtual desktops in any cloud effectively and consistently. Agility gained via security automation can help you minimize the time spent on managing security from days to hours. And unlike traditional endpoint security, the Bitdefender approach involves offloading centralized scanning to dedicated storage virtual appliances (SVAs), which frees up significant resources. Tests have shown up to 55% higher virtualization density and 36% faster application performance.
Cloud native applications can benefit from traditional testing tools, but these tools are not enough. Dedicated cloud native security tools are needed, able to instrument containers, container clusters, and serverless functions, report on security issues, and provide a fast feedback loop for developers.
Another important aspect of cloud native security is automated scanning of all artifacts, at all stages of the development lifecycle. Most importantly, organizations must scan container images at all stages of the development process.
A cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) provides a centralized control panel for the tools required to protect cloud native applications. It unifies cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) with other capabilities.
For most businesses, migrating to the cloud maximizes scalability and cost saving opportunities as well as makes data management easier. Companies can access infrastructure on demand, enabling them to maintain cloud security frameworks that keep pace with emerging threats.
Additionally, data owners typically communicate with public cloud providers across the public internet rather than within the protected perimeter of a local intranet and firewall. With social engineering attacks on the rise, sharing sensitive information without additional security measures in place can put organizations at higher risk.
Some organizations opt for open source cloud containers to combat public cloud security concerns. Because cloud containers create an isolated boundary at the application level, any problems will only affect that container rather than the entire server.
However, cloud containers also present unique security issues. For instance, securing Kubernetes clusters means keeping track of many moving parts and making sure each cluster is up-to-date with the latest security patches.
Like user workstations (i.e., faster and more capable computers intended for individual professional users), cloud workloads are vulnerable to malware, ransomware, and zero-day attacks. CWPP solutions protect workloads from such exploits as they move across different cloud environments.
CSPM solutions are designed to automate the identification and mitigation of risks across cloud infrastructures, making them easier to secure. By continuously monitoring risk in the cloud, CSPM helps organizations prevent, detect, respond, and predict risks in accordance with their centralized governance, security and compliance policies.
CSPM is particularly important for internet-facing resources since threat actors increasingly automate the process of probing cloud infrastructure for exploitable vulnerabilities. Because customer lists and intellectual property are easier for cyber criminals to quietly exfiltrate, configuration security failures often make headlines. 2ff7e9595c
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