From Zero to cyber-security Hero. How Microsoft became a Leader in Security.

Microsoft Security. Now a Leader in 5 Gartner Magic Quadrants

Whatever you may have once thought about Microsoft and Security, (I remember the days when security engineers would say that its due to the amount of security holes in Microsoft that they have a job) Microsoft is now a global leader in cybersecurity, and invest more than $1b annually in security R&D as well as processing more than 6.5Trillion security and threat signals per day to protect organisations and further enhance and develop their platform and their customers businesses.

Gartner has now named Microsoft Security a Leader in five Magic Quadrants which clearly demonstrates breadth and depth of their security portfolio and depth of integration across their platforms. The leader awards include…

  • Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
  • Access Management
  • Enterprise Information Archiving
  • Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)
  • Endpoint Protection Platforms

Gartner places vendors as Leaders who are able to demonstrate balanced progress and effort in all execution and vision categories. This means that Leaders not only have the people and capabilities to deliver strong solutions today, they also understand the market and have a strategy for meeting customer needs in the future.

Given this, Microsoft Security doesn’t just deliver strong security products in five crucial security areas only, as you look across the Microsoft 365, Azure and Dymanics platforms but also across customers in premise and 3rd party cloud providers, they are able to provide a comprehensive set of security solutions that are built to work together, from identity and access management to threat protection to information protection and cloud security.

Their services integrate easily and share intelligence from the 6.5 trillion of signals generated daily on the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. Customer thst are bought in to the wider Microsoft Security approach can monitor and safeguard identity, devices, applications and data across their end to end infrastructure and cloud solutions whether that is Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Slack, SAP, Citrix, Oracle, Salesforce, Google or many many others.

They key to this is their ability (like few others) to unify their security tools, bringing end to end visibility into their customer entire environment all drawn together with their new SEIM platform Azure Sentinel.

Where are the gaps?

There are some… Some of the main ones I see are around

1. Web security and DNS security.. The kind of stuff Cisco does really well with Umbrella for example.

2. Network and LAN segmentation. This is possible in Azure but other than some relatively “old” Network Access Control services in Windows Server, this is also an area Microsoft don’t really play in.

3. Industry Specific scenarios where long (99 year or so) retention policies and archiving is required. These are areas where solutions like Proof Point do really well in my experience.

What others do you see? Interested in your views and comments..

One Reply to “From Zero to cyber-security Hero. How Microsoft became a Leader in Security.”

Leave a Reply