CYBER SECURITY

Microsoft Security delivers new multi-cloud capabilities

Microsoft is announcing new advances to help businesses strengthen visibility and control across multiple cloud providers, workloads, devices, and digital identities. These new features and offerings are designed to secure the foundations of hybrid work and digital transformation. Please find an overview of the news below and visit Microsoft’s microsite for more details.

The always complex security landscape has become increasingly more so since Covid-19 kicked hybrid/remote work into high gear almost two years ago. These days, businesses are operating on a wide range of different devices, operating systems, and clouds. These complex environments can be cumbersome for IT professionals to manage security and employee access across so many different platforms. Cybercriminals crave this level of complexity because they know it’s harder for IT to protect the gaps across platforms. With 92% of organisations embracing a multi-cloud strategy, the time to act is now.

Today, Microsoft shared some news to help simplify security for businesses and help eliminate gaps between platforms:

• Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s native capabilities for workload and security posture management will be extended to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — This adds to existing Azure and AWS capabilities, seamlessly integrating IT cloud security tools now into the world’s three biggest clouds without any dependencies on Google 1st party tools. The support for GCP comes with a simplified onboarding experience, more than 80 out-of-thebox recommendations to harden customer environments, and more.

- Other New Features Include:

◊ New, Multicloud Secure Score gives organisations a central view of their posture across clouds, as well as for each cloud individually for a central view of their security posture.

◊ Automatic provisioning ensures that as soon as new resources are added to the environment, threat protection is provisioned to them right away.

• CloudKnox Permissions

Management enters public preview — The integration of this acquisition from July 2021 gives organisations the increased visibility and control of permissions management as they augment their Zero-trust postures across all the platforms they use.

These pieces of news are important steps in Microsoft’s security strategy of simplifying for customers and protecting them wherever they are, across platforms, across devices, across clouds.

For a closer look at the news, see the blog post by Vasu Jakkal, CVP of Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity, or visit Microsoft’s microsite to see all the details of today’s news.