Microsoft’s Cloud App Security service becomes available to everyone

Microsoft today announced that its Cloud App Security service, based on technology from its 2015 Adallom acquisition, is now generally available for anyone to use.

The company announced in February that this tool would be coming, and now it’s here.

“The solution provides a set of capabilities to help companies design and enforce a process for securing cloud usage; from discovery and investigation capabilities, to granular control and protection,” the Cloud App Security team wrote in a blog post. “It is easy to deploy, setup and use and provides out-of-the-box value immediately, as well as rich tutorials for unlocking advanced capabilities.”

Generally speaking, these tools allow companies to see which cloud services employees are using — shadow IT, to use industry parlance — and then start to limit that usage.

The service can integrate with firewalls and proxies from several vendors, including Blue Coat, Cisco, Palo Alto, Check Point, Juniper, and Sophos. When it comes to cloud services, the new tool can look out for usage of Amazon Web Services, Box, Dropbox, Google Apps, Office 365, ServiceNow, and Salesforce.

The launch of the technology means Microsoft is now competing with Skyhigh Networks (backed by Salesforce, Greylock Partners, and Sequoia Capital), Netskope (backed by Iconiq Capital), Elastica (acquired last year by Blue Coat), and other companies in the cloud access security broker (CASB) market.

More detail on the new service is here.