Microsoft Defender for Cloud (Azure Security Center)

The adoption of cloud technologies is driven by a need for efficiency and agility while reducing the costs associated with a traditional data center. The on-demand commissioning model of the cloud brings new security challenges, with every mouse-click offering the potential to introduce a security vulnerability.

The dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure leaves organizations playing catchup, trying to integrate security processes, products, and tools into their workflows from behind the curve. The result is a lack of consistency and the ever-present possibility of vulnerabilities being introduced, at the same time as the threat landscape continues to change and attacks become increasingly likely.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud, formerly known as Azure Security Center, offers Azure security protection, but extends beyond this to provide protection to all public and hybrid cloud environments, and that protection can be further enhanced by Check Point CloudGuard, allowing businesses to adopt confidently into Azure cloud, keeping their connectivity and digital assets secure.

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What is Microsoft Defender for Cloud (Azure Security Center)?

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a centralized management solution that provides security controls and tools to enable proactive protection against emerging threats in an evolving threat landscape. Default policies provide a secure foundation upon which custom policies can be built to suit your organization. All Azure and Office 365 services are automatically onboarded as they are commissioned, and continuously assessed to provide recommendations to improve security posture.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud workload protection (CWP), helping to improve the security of your environments and services in single cloud as well as multicloud and hybrid environments. Bringing endpoint protection, threat protection, and analysis into a single pane of glass reduces operational overhead for security teams. Integration with other Azure services, such as Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, and Azure Cloud App Security, provides robust and comprehensive cloud security.

Comprehensive Cloud Security Requires Advanced Tools

Cloud-native tools provide a good starting point for establishing a solid cloud security baseline, but to build a robust security posture you need tools with advanced capabilities to safeguard your digital assets from evolving threats in the cloud. Comprehensive cloud security requires:

  •  Visibility: Real-time detection, traffic visualization and user analytics.
  •  Automation: Templates and self-adaptive security policies.
  • Compliance and Governance: Tailored security reporting designed for governance and regulatory compliance.
  • Misconfiguration Prevention: Continuously assess configurations against defined standards, with automated remediation workflows.
  • Predictive Analytics: AI-powered anomaly detection and real-time malicious activity alerts.
  • Workload Protection: Extend security protection to containers and serverless for microservices-based workloads.

CloudGuard meets all these criteria and more, seamlessly integrating with native tools to enhance your cloud security posture with prebuilt features and tools designed for the modern cloud enterprise.

Enhance Microsoft Defender for Cloud with CloudGuard

Microsoft Defender for Cloud does a great job of bringing security tools together into a single view and providing both real-time views and recommendations for future enhancements, but there is always room for improvement. 

Check Point’s CloudGuard for Microsoft Azure is an Azure certified technology solution and delivers a best-in-class experience for organizations seeking to extend security protection to Azure environments. CloudGuard provides secure connectivity while protecting cloud assets with industry-leading threat prevention. CloudGuard integrates with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, as well as many other native Azure services, building on the strengths of Azure and providing more effective security outcomes.

CloudGuard offers protection across the migration lifecycle, and organizations can achieve advanced security configurations for protection from the data center to the cloud. Seamless Azure integration brings with it the multi-layered security controls to enable scalability and availability, designed for dynamic cloud deployments.

CloudGuard brings many enhancements to Microsoft Defender for Cloud, including:

  • Visibility and Control: Unified security management across Azure, public and private cloud, and on-premises assets, with improved visibility and consolidated logging. High-availability and auto-scaling allows dynamic growth of the security footprint in response to business needs, providing the confidence to migrate to and host in the cloud.
  • Protection: Industry-leading threat prevention, with fully integrated security protection including Firewall, Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), Antivirus, Anti-Bot, IPsec VPN, Remote Access, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and sandbox technology for zero-day protection.
  • Fix Config Errors: With automated workflows and orchestration, CloudGuard’s dynamic security policies minimizes configuration errors and operational costs.
  • On-Prem: Extend the cloud security capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Cloud to on-prem, maintaining consistent security controls.
  • Centralized Management: Configuration of cloud and on-prem security from a single dashboard, enabling consistency and compatibility across environments.
  • Consolidated Logging: Complete threat visibility and enforcement thanks to CloudGuard consolidated logging and reporting via SmartEvent, with SIEM integration available. All security analysis and reporting are in the same dashboard, providing a holistic view.
  • Remote Access: CloudGuard uses Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) for scalable Azure access for remote users over almost-unlimited VPN, enabling secure connections any time, from anywhere.

One-click CloudGuard deployment rapidly and flexibly extends security to the Azure cloud. Use Azure Resource Manager templates to deploy CloudGuard security gateways and customize to your needs using the Check Point advanced threat protection suite.

Check Point CloudGuard takes advantage of the Azure security baseline and tightly integrates advanced security features designed for large deployments to the cloud. Building upon Microsoft Defender for Cloud, CloudGuard enables customers to build with confidence, safe in the knowledge that their security posture is consistent from on-prem to cloud, thanks to the full range of protections offered by Check Point CloudGuard.

Learn more about how Check Point CloudGuard and Microsoft Azure Defender for cloud provides advanced security protections for public and hybrid cloud networks. Read and learn more with the Check Point Secure Cloud Blueprint for Azure.

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CloudGuard and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Integration

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