Microsoft is making a new play in the cybersecurity space with the announcement of a new service category called Microsoft Security Experts. The new suite of services will pair expert-trained technology with human-led services in an effort to help customers attain more secure, compliant and productive outcomes at their organizations.
The new services help address some of today's biggest cybersecurity challenges. According to Microsoft, Microsoft Security blocked more than 9.6 billion malware threats last year alone, along with more than 35.7 billion phishing attempts and malicious emails. The team is currently tracking more than 35 ransomware families, 150 unique threat actors and more than 900 brute force password theft attempts every second.
The goal of Microsoft Security Experts will be to deliver a new category of services across security, compliance, identity, management and privacy. The company has developed three new managed services to kick off its initiative and help clients scale their security initiatives to meet today's challenging landscape.
The new Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting service is geared toward customers who already have robust security operations centers in place. The managed service will help those organizations proactively hunt for threats across Microsoft Defender data. This includes endpoints, Office 365, cloud appliacations and identity data. Microsoft experts will investigate activities and pass along contextual alerts and remediation instructions so customers can respond in a timely manner. The new service also features an Experts on Demand option, enabling customers to consult with a Microsoft expert about specific incidents.
The new Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR is aimed at customers who wish to expand the capacity of their security operations center (SOC). This managed extended detection and response (XDR) service goes beyond endpoints, providing detection and response services across Microsoft 365Defender. It also investigates alerts and uses automation and human expertise to respond to incidents in tandem with customer teams.
The final managed service in the new category is Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise. This offering is geared toward large enterprises who want comprehensive, personalized service from Microsoft experts. The offering combines proactive threat hunting and managed XDR and takes advantage of Microsoft's SIEM and XDR stack to protect all cloud environments and platforms. Enterprises will benefit from dedicated Microsoft security experts who will manage daily interactions and onboarding as well as provide incident response.
"Our vision is to deliver this new category of services across security, compliance, identity, management and privacy," wrote Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president, security, compliance, identity, and management. "The first step on that journey is offering new and expanded services for security. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help our customers and their partners meet today’s security challenges. We secure devices, identities, apps, and clouds — the fundamental fabric of our customers’ lives — with the full scale of our comprehensive multicloud, multiplatform solutions. Plus, we understand today’s security challenges because we live this fight ourselves every single day."
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Edited by
Erik Linask
