Microsoft earlier this year announced general availability for another addition to their cybersecurity portfolio: Azure Advanced Threat Protection (Azure ATP for short) – a cloud-based service for monitoring and protecting hybrid IT infrastructures against targeted cyberattacks and malicious insider activities.
The technology behind this service is actually not new. Microsoft has acquired it back in 2014 with the purchase of Aorato, an Israel-based startup company specializing in hybrid cloud security solutions. Aorato’s behavior detection methodology, named Organizational Security Graph, enables non-intrusive collection of network traffic, event logs and other data sources in an enterprise network and then, using behavior analysis and machine learning algorithms, detects suspicious activities, security issues and cyber-attacks against corporate Active Directory servers.
Although this may sound like an overly specialized tool, in reality solutions like this can be a very useful addition to any company’s security infrastructure – after all, according to statistics, the vast majority of security breaches leverage compromised credentials, and close monitoring of the heart of nearly every company’s identity management – the Active Directory servers – allows for quicker identification of both known malicious attacks and traces of unknown but suspicious activities. And since practically every cyberattack involves manipulating stolen credentials at some stage of the killchain, identifying them early allows security experts to discover these attacks much earlier than the typical 99+ days.
Back in 2016, we have reviewed Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA), the first product Microsoft released with the Security Graph technology. KuppingerCole’s verdict at the time was that the product was easy to deploy, transparent and non-intrusive, with an innovative and intuitive user interface, yet powerful enough to identify a wide range of security issues, malicious attacks and suspicious activities in corporate networks. However, the product was only intended for on-premises deployment and provided very limited forensic and mitigation capabilities due to lack of integration with other security tools.
Well, with the new solution, Microsoft has successfully addressed both of these challenges. Azure ATP, as evident from its name, is a cloud-based service. Although you obviously still need to deploy sensors within your network to capture the network traffic and other security events, they are sent directly to the Azure cloud, and all the correlation magic happens over there. This makes the product substantially more scalable and fitting even for the largest corporate networks. In addition, it can directly consume the latest threat intelligence data collected by Microsoft across its cloud infrastructure.
On top of that, Azure ATP integrates with Windows Defender ATP – Microsoft’s endpoint protection platform. If you’re using both platforms, you can seamlessly switch between them for additional forensic information or direct remediation of malware threats on managed endpoints. In fact, the company’s Advanced Threat Protection brand now also includes Office 365 ATP, which provides protection against malicious emails and URLs, as well as secures files in Office 365 applications.
With all three platforms combined, Microsoft can now offer seamless protection against malicious attacks across the most critical attack surfaces as a fully managed cloud-based solution.
is lead analyst at KuppingerCole. Read more KuppingerCole blogs here.
