Security posture management and risk reduction
To battle increasingly sophisticated and well-resourced threat actors, security teams need a comprehensive strategy that reduces vulnerabilities, prevents breaches, and mitigates threats in real-time.
Microsoft's unified SecOps platform provides a set of integrated tools and solutions that work together to help security teams proactively reduce security risk.
Proactive security management allows you to manage cybersecurity as an ongoing risk, rather than series of unpredictable events. Proactive risk management helps to reduce the likelihood of breaches, minimize business disruptions when attacks do occur, and raise security awareness as an ongoing practice across the business.
Improving prebreach security
Security teams must address key activities for effective prebreach security.
| Activity | Details |
|---|---|
| Protect assets and workloads | Teams must be able to improve posture across all types of corporate resources, including devices, identities, apps, and cloud workloads from code to runtime. |
| Discover the digital estate | Discovering organizational assets in the first step in understanding security posture. Centralizing assets into a single inventory provides unified and broad visibility across company silos. |
| Understand asset connections | In addition to continuously discovering and tracking assets, security teams must be able to visualize and understand complex connections and interactions between discovered resources. |
| Aggregate asset data | Collecting data and correlating signals from multiple sources to arrive at a single accurate contextual representation of each digital asset helps security teams to understand and uncover security gaps and weaknesses, including potential attack paths. |
| Get security insights | Security teams need the ability to investigate and query security findings to understand misconfigurations and security posture drift as risks change. Over time, insights help security teams to answer questions such as - How secure are we right now? How are we doing over time? Where do we stand on mitigation? What areas are weakest? Are we protected against the latest threats? |
| Adhere to compliance standards | Compliance standards provide structured, well-known guidelines around security controls and measures. Proactive and ongoing security posture management ensures that your organization meets compliance requirements. |
| Remediate security | Prioritizing asset remediation by focusing on critical resources helps focus team effort by reducing security gaps and attack surfaces in the most important areas of the business. |
| Measure progress | Security posture improvement and attack surface reduction are ongoing activities. Consistent measurement of how you're doing over time helps to ensure that you reach security targets and maintain compliance in your most critical security initiatives. |
| Continuously improve | Use security posture management to provide fast and continuous feedback to risk management frameworks and SOC teams. |
Microsoft solutions
A range of solutions within Microsoft's unified SecOps platform helps security teams to proactively improve security posture.
| Solution | Details | Capabilities |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Security Exposure Management Reduce security risk by reducing attack surfaces. |
Automatically discover assets, including devices, identities, cloud apps, and more. Extend visibility to non-Microsoft solutions. Aggregate security posture data across data silos into a single location. Organize data into security initiatives to monitor, track, measure, and prioritize posture in the areas that are most important to you. identify, classify, and protect critical business assets to reduce the likelihood of them being attacked. Discover and visualize attack surfaces and potential blast radius. Understand and analyze potential attack paths to map how attackers might exploit vulnerabilities across the organization. Get contextual insights to understand, prioritize, and mitigate security risk. |
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| Microsoft Defender for Cloud Detect real-time threats to cloud workloads, and proactively improve security posture. |
Cloud security posture management capabilities assess the posture of resources across Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-premises. Defender for Cloud improves security posture for machines, containers, sensitive data, databases, AI workloads, storage, and DevOps. Security recommendations provide information and manual/automatic actions to remediate issues and harden resource security. |
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| Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Improve security posture and protect against threats. |
Defender for Endpoint includes a number of security posture management features. Attack surface reduction proactively blocks common activities associated with malicious actions, and provides attack surface reduction rules to constrain risky software-based behavior. Other features include controlled folder access, peripheral device control, exploit protection, network and web protection. |
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| Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Remediate security vulnerabilities across the organization. |
Defender Vulnerability Management continuously identifies vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, providing contextual insights into potential threats, and recommendations to mitigate them. | |
| Microsoft Secure Score Measure organizational security posture. |
Secure Score helps to monitor the security posture of Microsoft 365 workloads, including devices, identities, and apps. Compare Security Score with security posture in Security Exposure Management. |