Microsoft launches Advanced Threat Analytics out of preview following Aorato acquisition

Microsoft today announced that its Advanced Threat Analytics software for companies’ on-premises data centers is now generally available. The release comes two months after Microsoft came out with a free public preview of the software.

Advanced Threat Analytics “helps companies identify advanced persistent threats before they can cause damage,” Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of enterprise client and mobility at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on the news. When he announced the preview of the software, Anderson wrote that it brings “Azure AD [Active Directory] style security monitoring and anomaly detection on-premises.”

Once the software gets a sense of every employee’s typical activity and access patterns, it detects unusual behavior, which could suggest an issue. The idea, of course, is to discover incidents right away and mitigate damage. The tool looks out for cases of remote execution, brute force attacks, skeleton key malware, and pass-the-ticket attacks, among other things.

It’s all based on technology Microsoft picked up through its 2014 acquisition of startup Aorato.

The software is one component of Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), which the company announced at the same San Francisco press event where chief executive Satya Nadella unveiled Office for iPad.

EMS now has more than 17,000 customers, Anderson wrote.

Microsoft today also announced the general availability of support for its Azure Rights Management service for Office for iPad. As a result, company admins can set up rules for the things employees can do with certain files.