Microsoft launches Azure Security Center out of preview

Microsoft today announced that it’s releasing the Azure Security Center service — for detecting and making recommendations about security vulnerabilities — out of preview. Azure Security Center became available in public preview in December.

More than 100,000 Azure subscribers have since tried it out on “hundreds of thousands of virtual machines,” Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk, general manager for Azure Security at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

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There’s now more support for Linux virtual machines through the service, and issues like lateral movement, internal reconnaissance, outgoing attacks, and malicious scripts can now be detected, too. And you can now opt to have vulnerability assessment information from third-party vendors like Qualys fed into the service, Braverman-Blumenstyk wrote.

Having systems to watch over public cloud resources that run companies’ applications might seem important and obvious, but Microsoft only recently moved to introduce Azure Security Center, along with the Advanced Threat Detection tier. And Microsoft’s top competitor in the public cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), just announced its Inspector security service in October.

There are startups with cloud security tools to use — CloudPassage, Dome9, Illumio — but it probably does make sense for them to be accessible right from the place where you’re provisioning and managing the cloud resources. At least Amazon and Microsoft think so.

Also today, Microsoft said that its Azure Active Directory Identity Protection and Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management services will both launch out of preview before the end of the this quarter.

More information on what’s new in Azure Security Center is here.