Microsoft today announced a new product family, Microsoft Entra, which encompasses all of Microsoft’s identity and access capabilities. Microsoft Entra includes Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) as well as two new product categories: a Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) solution called Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and a decentralized identity product offering, Microsoft Entra Verified ID.

Joy Chik Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Identity, said, “We are seeing an increasing need for trust in a hyperconnected world. Through Microsoft Entra, we’re expanding our identity and access solutions so that they can serve as a trust fabric for the entire digital ecosystem—now and long into the future.”

Vasu Jakkal ,Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management at Microsoft, added, “Microsoft Entra embodies our vision for what modern secure access should be. Identity should be an entryway into a world of new possibilities, not a blockade restricting access, creating friction, and holding back innovation. We want people to explore, to collaborate, to experiment—not because they are reckless, but because they are fearless.”

The digital estates of organizations are growing, changing, and becoming boundaryless. Security challenges have become much broader, and there is a need for broader solutions. Organizations need access decisions to be as granular as possible, and to automatically adapt based on real-time assessment of risk. Microsoft Entra is part of Microsoft’s expanded vision for identity and access. It will verify all types of identities and secure, manage, and govern their access to any resource, by:

• Protecting access to any app or resource for any user;
• Securing and verifying every identity across hybrid and multicloud environments;
• Discovering and governing permissions in multicloud environments; and
• Simplifying the user experience with real-time intelligent access decisions.

Reducing access risk across clouds

The adoption of multicloud has led to a massive increase in identities, permissions, and resources across public cloud platforms. Without visibility across cloud providers, or tools that provide a consistent experience, it is become incredibly challenging for identity and security teams to manage permissions and enforce the principle of least privilege across their entire digital estate.

Following the acquisition of CloudKnox Security last year, Microsoft is now the first major cloud provider to offer a CIEM solution—Microsoft Entra Permissions Management. It provides comprehensive visibility into permission for all identities (both user and workload), actions, and resources across multicloud infrastructures. Permissions Management helps detect, right-size, and monitor unused and excessive permissions, and mitigates the risk of data breaches by enforcing the principle of least privilege in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.

Microsoft Entra Permissions Management will be a standalone offering generally available worldwide in July 2022 and will be integrated within the Defender for Cloud dashboard, extending Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s protection into CIEM.

In addition, the preview of workload identity management in Microsoft Entra will allow Microsoft customers to assign and secure identities for any app or service hosted in Azure, by extending the reach of access control and risk detection capabilities.

Enabling secure digital interactions that respect privacy

Microsoft Entra Verified ID is a new product offering based on decentralized identity standards that implements the industry standards, making portable, self-owned identity possible.

Verified ID represents Microsoft’s commitment to an open, trustworthy, interoperable, and standards-based decentralized identity future for individuals and organizations. Instead of granting broad consent to countless apps and services and spreading identity data across numerous providers, Verified ID allows individuals and organizations to decide what information they share, when they share it, with whom they share it, and—when necessary—take it back.

Microsoft Entra Verified ID will be generally available in early August 2022.

Automating critical Identity Governance scenarios

IT and security teams are facing enormous challenges to provision new users and guest accounts and manage their access rights manually. Using Identity Governance in Azure AD, Microsoft’s existing cloud‑based identity and access management service, businesses can address these challenges with identity lifecycle management, which simplifies the processes for onboarding and offboarding users. Lifecycle workflows automate assigning and managing access rights, and monitoring and tracking access, as user attributes change.

Lifecycle workflows in Identity Governance will enter public preview in July 2022.

Visit the Microsoft Entra website to learn more about how Azure AD, Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, and Microsoft Entra Verified ID deliver secure access for our connected world.

Microsoft today announced that it is offering new and expanded services for security under a new service category, Microsoft Security Experts. Security Experts includes three new managed services—Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, Microsoft Defender Experts for extended detection and response (XDR), Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise—as well as two existing services, Microsoft Security Experts for Modernization, and Microsoft Security Experts for Incident Response.  

The security landscape has become increasingly challenging and complex for all customers. Threats have grown at an alarming rate over the last year, and cybercrime is now expected to cost the world US$10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from US$3 trillion a decade ago and US$6 trillion in 2021.[i]  

Last year, Microsoft Security blocked over 9.6 billion malware threats and more than 35.7 billion phishing and other malicious emails. Microsoft Security is actively tracking more than 35 ransomware families and 250 unique threat actors across observed nation-state, ransomware, and criminal activities, and its technology has blocked more than 900 brute force password theft attempts every second. 

Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance and Identity at Microsoft, said: “As attacks increase in scale, so must our defenses. It’s getting harder every day for organizations to build and maintain a full security team, let alone one with the ever-expanding skillset required to meet the range of today’s security demands. This is why we are launching Microsoft Security Experts, which combines expert-trained technology with human-led services to help organizations achieve more secure, compliant, and productive outcomes. It is our vision of delivering this category of services end-to-end, across security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy.”

• One in four small to medium-sized businesses has experienced a security breach¹ in the past year and lacks the resources of large enterprises to protect themselves 

On Monday, Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability (GA) of the stand-alone version of Microsoft Defender for Business. Defender for Business brings enterprise-grade endpoint security to SMBs, including endpoint detection and response capabilities to protect against ransomware and other sophisticated cyberthreats.

In April 2022, Microsoft surveyed more than 150 small and medium businesses in an online quantitative survey in the U.S. to better understand changing SMB security needs. The survey found that more than 70% of SMBs think cyberthreats are becoming more of a business risk. That concern is well-founded — nearly one in four SMBs surveyed reported experiencing a security breach in the past year.

Despite facing similar risks as enterprises, SMBs often lack access to the right resources and tools, including specialized security staff. Many SMBs still rely on traditional antivirus solutions for their security. Although 80% of SMBs state they have some form of antivirus solution, 93% continue to have concerns about increasing and evolving cyberattacks.

“Microsoft believes in security for all,” said Vasu Jakkal, CVP, security, compliance & identity at Microsoft. “We are proud to further deliver on that vision today. With the GA of Defender for Business, SMBs will get greater protection with simplified security to help them better protect, detect and respond to threats.”

With Defender for Business, SMBs get multilayered protection, detection and response, spanning the five phases of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework — identify, protect, detect, respond and recover — to protect and remediate against known and unknown threats.

Defender for Business comes with built-in policies to get customers up and running quickly. The automated investigation and remediation capabilities in Defender for Business help automate the type of work handled by dedicated SecOps teams, by continuously detecting and automatically remediating various threats.

“Automated investigation and remediation are a huge part of the product,” said Adam Atwell, cloud solutions architect at consulting firm Kite Technology Group. “It’s just happening in the background. Defender for Business makes our security so simple.”

Defender for Business is also included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium, our comprehensive security and productivity solution for businesses with up to 300 employees. Customers can also choose to buy it stand-alone for $3 per user, per month. Additional support for servers is planned later this calendar year with an add-on solution.

Microsoft Defender for Business product features:

• Threat and vulnerability management helps prioritize and focus on weaknesses that pose the most urgent and highest risk to business. Proactively build a secure foundation for your environment by discovering, prioritizing and remediating software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. 
• Attack surface reduction options help minimize attack surface (i.e., places where your company is vulnerable to cyberattacks across your devices and applications), leaving bad actors with fewer ways to execute attacks. 
• Next-generation protection helps prevent and protect against threats with antimalware and antivirus protection on devices and in the cloud. 
• Endpoint detection and response provides behavioral-based detection and response alerts so that you can identify persistent threats and remove them from your environment. 
• Auto-investigation and remediation help scale security operations by examining alerts and taking immediate action to resolve attacks for customers. By reducing alert volume and remediating threats, Microsoft Defender for Business enables customers to prioritize tasks and focus on more sophisticated threats. 

Defender for Business and Microsoft 365 Business Premium give partners new opportunities to help secure customers at scale with value-add managed services. Both solutions integrate with Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, which was made generally available on March 1, 2022, so Microsoft cloud service providers can view security incidents across tenants in a unified portal.

Additional resources

• Sign up for Microsoft Defender for Business 
• Microsoft Partner blog 
• Microsoft Defender for Business partner kit and Microsoft 365 Business Premium Partner Playbook 
• Partner webinar 
• TechCommunity blog 
• Customer case study: Martin & Zerfoss and Kite Technology Group optimize business advantages of Microsoft Defender for Business