Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference takes place this week, and the company has already announced dozens of new products, improvements and services designed to help organizations be more secure and productive.
In total, Microsoft announced more than 100 new products, all of which can be found in the company’s Book of News. Since it’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we’re highlight some of the more important security announcements from the tech giant.
Microsoft Defender for DevOps
The company is doubling down on its cloud security offerings, and this is now extending to development environments with the introduction of Microsoft Defender for DevOps. The company says this new product in the Defender family enables security teams to unify, strengthen and manage DevOps security to help minimize vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations and drive remediation in code across multi-pipeline environments.
Microsoft also announced at Ignite the preview of Microsoft Defender Cloud Security Posture Management, a new tool designed to help security teams remediate the most critical risks with contextual cloud security. Agentless scanning capabilities give full coverage and real-time assessments across hybrid and multicloud environments, and the tool connects the dots by integrating insights from Defender for DevOps, Defender External Attack Surface management and workload protection solutions.
Microsoft Entra Identity Governance, new Purview products
In addition to enhancements to Defender for Cloud, the company announced the preview of Microsoft Entra Identity Governance, another product in the Entra line designed to help organizations secure identities and give the right access to the right resources at the right time. This also includes Lifecycle Workflows, a tool to automate repetitive tasks and separation of duties in entitlements management to safeguard against compliance issues, the company says.
To help protect sensitive data and protect against insider risks, Microsoft is growing the Purview family of governance, risk and compliance solutions with the general availability of Microsoft Purview Information Protection for Adobe Document Cloud. The company says this combines the power of active classification and labeling with the power of Adobe Acrobat to seamlessly secure PDFs. Other new data loss prevention capabilities are also in preview.
Endpoint management
For enhanced endpoint management, the company announced at Ignite an advanced endpoint management plan that will include endpoint privilege management, intelligent automation and data insights, remote help, and automated app patching–all based on Intune. This creates a unified console and security stack that includes Azure Active Directory, Defender, Priva and more. Customers with a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license will be able to take advantage of the new suite once it launches in March 2023.
Intune is also the new name for the company’s growing family of endpoint management products.
XDR
To help defenders respond to threats, Microsoft announced the preview of automatic attack disruption in Microsoft 365 Defender. Available for E5 licensees, this leverages automation inherent in extended detection and response (XDR) to correlate trillions of signals across identities, endpoints, email, documents, cloud apps and more to detect in-progress attacks. Affected assets will be automatically isolated, the company says.
Microsoft says it is also simplifying the investigation experiences in Microsoft Defender and Sentinel and introducing a new unified search experience and low-cost options of log storage to help SOC teams quickly search large volumes of historic data.
Cost reductions
Microsoft says it is offering a new limited-time offer to help organizations respond to the growing threat landscape, giving new and existing customers 50% off Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P1 and P2 licenses. This starts on Nov. 1, and the offer expires on June 30, 2023.
Stay tuned for more coverage of Microsoft’s announcements from its Ignite conference.
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