Microsoft Ignite: Top 10 Announcements
Monday 18th November 2019
At the Microsoft Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced new innovations designed to help customers across their security, compliance, and identity needs.
Here are the top 10 announcements:
1. Azure Sentinel—Microsoft are introducing new connectors in Azure Sentinel to help security analysts collect data from a variety of sources, including Zscaler, Barracuda, and Citrix. In addition, they're releasing new hunting queries and machine learning-based detections to assist analysts in prioritizing the most important events.
2. Insider Risk Management in Microsoft 365—Microsoft have announced a new insider risk management solution in Microsoft 365 to help identify and remediate threats stemming from within an organization. Now in private preview, this new solution leverages the Microsoft Graph along with third-party signals, like HR systems, to identify hidden patterns that traditional methods would likely miss.
3. Microsoft Authenticator—Microsoft are making Microsoft Authenticator available to you as part of the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) free plan. Deploying Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) reduces the risk of phishing and other identity-based attacks by 99.9 percent.
4. New value in Azure AD—Previewing at the end of November, Azure AD Connect cloud provisioning is a new lightweight agent to move identities from disconnected Active Directory (AD) forests to the cloud. Additionally, Microsoft are announcing secure hybrid access partnerships with F5 Networks, Zscaler, Citrix, and Akamai to simplify access to legacy-auth based applications. Lastly, they're introducing a re-imagined MyApps portal to help make apps more discoverable for end-users.
5. Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)—Microsoft are extending their endpoint detection and response capability in Microsoft Defender ATP to include MacOS, now in preview. They're also planning to add support for Linux servers.
6. Azure Security Center—Microsoft have announced new capabilities to find misconfigurations and threats for containers and SQL in IaaS while providing rich vulnerability assessment for virtual machines. Azure Security Center also provides integration with security alerts from partners and quick fixes for fast remediation.
7. Microsoft information protection and governance—The compliance center in Microsoft 365 now provides the ability to view data classifications categorized by sensitive information types or associated with industry regulations. Machine learning also allows you to use your existing data to train classifiers that are unique to your organization, such as customer records, HR data, and contracts.
8. Microsoft Compliance Score—Now in public preview, Microsoft Compliance Score helps simplify regulatory complexity and reduce risk. It maps your Microsoft 365 configuration settings to common regulations and standards, providing continuous monitoring and recommended actions to improve your compliance posture. Microsoft are also introducing a new assessment for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
9. Application Guard for Office—Now available in preview, Application Guard for Office provides hardware-level and container-based protection against potentially malicious Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. It utilizes Microsoft Defender ATP to establish whether a document is either malicious or trusted.
10. Azure Firewall Manager—Now in public preview, you can manage multiple firewall instances from a single pane of glass with Azure Firewall Manager. Microsoft are also creating support for new firewall deployment topologies.
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