Tag: Forrester

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Forrester: Microsoft Leading the Charge in XDR Innovation

This blog post captures Microsoft’s latest achievements, innovations and recognition in cybersecurity as reported by Forrester in their recent wave report on Extended Dedection and Response (XDR) plafforms. Here is have focussed on the latest developments and Microsoft’s move to leading in this report.

The ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, organisations face the challenge of defending against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. Based on the analysis performed by Forrester in their 2024 Wave report, Microsoft has yet again risen to the occasion, with them being placed at the far out leader in Forrester Wave: Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms – Q2, 2024, pushing them ahead of both Palo Alto and Crowdstrike in this recent report. They have been leaders in this space for over 4 years but this year pulled further ahead than ever before.

In the last year, 75% of security professionals witnessed an increase in attacks with 85% attributing this rise to bad actors using generative AI

Report By Security Magazine 2023


The Forrester report details how to protect against the constant and more spohisticated AI powered “intelligent attacks”, a Unified Approach to Cybersecurity is needed rather than a traditional add-on and multi-vendor approach. Forrester comment how Microsoft Defender XDR stands out with its unified visibility, investigation, and response capabilities. It integrates seamlessly across endpoints, IoT, OT, identities, email, collaboration tools, SaaS apps, cloud workloads, and data insights, providing end-to-end protection.

Generative A is the Game-Changer

Forrester say that the introduction of Microsoft Copilot for Security marks a significant milestone in Microsoft’s approach to XDR. This generative AI solution simplifies incident remediation, reverse engineers malware code, and empowers analysts with natural language processing to generate Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries.

Microsoft’s Automatic Attack Disruption – also powered by their latest AI and Threat Hunting services, has led to the development of automatic attack disruption features in Defender XDR. This technology can detect and disrupt ransomware and other advanced attacks within minutes, showcasing the power of AI in cybersecurity. The services work seemlessly toegther across their wider Azure and Microsoft 365 security portoflio making these a real multi-layered protect, detect and respond approach rather than multiple products stacked on top of each other.

The Future of Cyber Defense

Microsoft’s recognition by Forrester underscores its dedication to innovation and excellence in cybersecurity. As cyber threats continue to evolve, Microsoft’s XDR and unified security operations platforms will remain essential tools in the arsenal of cybersecurity professionals.

In Microsoft’s own blog post on the matter they state that “We believe Forrester’s recognition showcases that Microsoft Defender XDR is the broadest native XDR solution on the market and that our most recent additions of Microsoft Defender for Cloud data and Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management data are critical to give the SOC access to end-to-end data. Its incident-level visibility, automatic attack disruption of advanced attacks, and accelerated detection and response now work across endpoints, Internet of Things (IoT), operational technology (OT), on-premises and cloud identities, email and collaboration tools, software as a service (SaaS) apps, cloud workloads, and data insights.”

“Microsoft is refining the most complete XDR offering in the market today, their dedication to innovation is demonstrated by its percentage of the R&D budget by revenue, which rivals the most innovative vendors in security.”

Forrester Wave Report: Q2 2024

Summary

Great to see Microsoft continue to innovate in this area, after Satya Nadella stated that they are “priotitising security above all else” in a recent report.

The recent report from Forrester does not of course mean that the other vendors in this report are no good. The familiar vendors such as Palo Alto, Crowdsrike continue to innovate in this space and the others are working hard to move up the quadrant.

Others to mention are Cisco who have moved into the Challengers Quadrant this year, following huge investments in thier Cisco Secure Cloud platform and their continued invenstment to bolster their security portfolio.

It is worth noting that XDR is just one of the security pillars reported on by Forrester and other leading analysts like Gartner.

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Microsoft Security recognised as a Leader in 8 Forrester Wave™ categories

Microsoft has been recognised over the last 12 months as leaders in 8 Forrester Wave catagories.

Did you know, Microsoft analyse over 24 trillion security signals every 24 hours offering a uniquely comprehensive view of the current state of security.

This is backed by over 8,500 security experts from across 77 countries that provide a critical perspective on the security landscape and helps protect against industry and state nation attacks.

Microsoft say that “When you have comprehensive security, you have the freedom to grow your enterprise to match your vision. Comprehensive security is not only coverage, but also best-in-breed protection, built-in intelligence, and simplified management”.

1. Unified Endpoint Management

Microsoft Endpoint Manager brings together Microsoft Intune for cloud endpoint management and Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager for endpoints on-premises, empowers organisations to protect their apps and devices across platforms for a resilient, productive workforce.

Image (c) Forrester Research 2021

2. Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

Extended detection and response (XDR) is an early-stage market, and current vendor capabilities reflect that. XDR products have variegated feature sets based on their maturity, native portfolio, and vision for the SoC which is thought will likely replace (longer term) SEIM.

Microsoft Defender combines SIEM and XDR to increase efficiency and effectiveness while securing your digital estate. It allows IT to get insights across their entire organisation with their cloud-native SIEM, Microsoft Sentinel. Customer can leverage integrated, automated XDR to protect end users with Microsoft 365 Defender, and secure their multi cloud infrastructure with Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Image (c) Forrester Research 2021

3. Identity as a Service

The shift to hybrid or fully remote workforces has also accelerated user access that bypasses enterprise networks. To manage these changes, organisations are looking to IDaaS providers to serve as their primary identity provider (IDP).

Image (c) Forrester Research 2021

4. Security Analytics Platforms

In the past, vendors offered traditional SIEM systems as on-premises hardware or software deployments. In 2020, Azure Sentinel became the industry’s first cloud-native SIEM on a major public cloud.

Most of the vendors included in Forrester’s evaluation of the security analytics platform market deliver their products via SaaS or cloud-hosted models. This change has enabled vendors to more quickly roll out new capabilities to their customers and decrease the management overhead for these systems.

Image (c) Forrester Research Q4 2020

5. Enterprise Email Security

Microsoft were positioned as a leader for Enterprise Email Security, Q2 2021 receiving among the highest scores in the strategy category. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 also received the highest possible score in the incident response, threat intelligence, and endpoint and endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions integration criteria, as well as in the product strategy, customer success, and performance and operations criteria.

Image (c) Forrester Research 2021

6. Endpoint Security Software as a Service

Microsoft 365 Defender received one of the highest scores in the strategy category. Forrester notes that “the focus on endpoint security has increased as cyber risks shift from the network to the endpoints, prompted by increasing amounts of homeworkers and the bulk movement of data from enterprise network-connected data centers to edge devices.”

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is seamlessly built into Microsoft 365 Defender, and their XDR offering brings capabilities for identities, endpoints, cloud apps, email, and documents.

Microsoft 365 Defender delivers intelligent, automated, and integrated security in a unified security operations (SecOps) experience, with detailed threat analytics and insights, unified threat hunting, and rapid detection and automation across domains – detecting and stopping attacks anywhere in the kill chain and eliminating persistent threats.

Image (c) Forrester Research 2021

7. Unstructured Data Security Platforms

Microsoft has significantly increased their investment in building risk management and compliance solutions, inclusive of information protection and data loss prevention (DLP). They delivered new solutions, such as Microsoft Information Protection, Endpoint DLP, and product features, including trainable classifiers, the “know your data” dashboard, and enhanced sensitive information types, to name a few. Additionally, Microsoft continues to invest in extending the Microsoft Information Protection ecosystem with continued innovation via their SDK. Over 200 partners now extend this protection capabilities to various industry or vendor specific use cases.

Image (c) Forrester Research 2021

8.Cloud Security Gateways

Microsoft Defender for Cloud (formally Cloud App Security) received the highest possible score in the strategy category.

Defender for Cloud is focused on helping organisations gain visibility of all their cloud apps, discover shadow IT, protect sensitive information anywhere in the cloud, enable protection against cyber threats, assess compliance, and manage security posture across clouds.

Image (c) Forrester Research 2021

Read the digital defence report

To find out more read the Microsoft Digital Defence Report.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/business/be-fearless

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