Foreword

As customers’ path toward the cloud and digital transformation continues, we see increased complexity in our cloud environments, moving from traditional VM workloads to cloud-native applications and leveraging an increasing selection of PaaS services. This introduces new challenges to cloud providers, security vendors, and security teams who have to familiarize themselves with dozens—or even hundreds—of PaaS services and ensure each is secured properly, given the correct context.

Securing these cloud workloads starts with reducing the attack surface by maintaining the security posture and defense-in-depth. This can be quite a challenge given the variety and the sheer number of posture misconfigurations and vulnerabilities found on an average cloud workload. This book goes into detail on how Defender for Cloud can be used to fully visualize the customer’s cloud estate. It also helps identify the attack surface across all workload types (prioritizing risks using Secure Score, guiding customers to which threat to address first, and providing the customers with at-scale tooling to build cloud-native applications that are secure from day-1). Lastly, this book helps you enforce the correct set of policies to avoid drift.

While posture management is a must, it must be complemented with threat detection capabilities that can detect sophisticated attackers in a timely manner and assist SOC teams’ response by blocking or mitigating these threats. In this book, Yuri and Tom share their knowledge of how Defender for Cloud identifies cyberattacks by leveraging signals from across the cloud workload, including VMs, containers, PaaS access logs, admin activity, networking, and more. And they tell you how this knowledge can be applied in a modern SOC to respond to such attacks.

If you are an IT or Security leader, I highly recommend you share this book with your teams. It is relevant to any organization that needs to protect and defend IT workloads across clouds and hybrid environments.

Gilad Elyashar,

Partner Director on Product Management

Microsoft Cloud Security