In this article, you will learn:
- What Azure Defender is;
- Why companies make use of Azure Defender;
- Types of sources where you can apply Defender in Azure;
What is Azure Defender?
Before we dive deeper into Azure Defender, let's look at its origins: the Microsoft Defender, a leading XDR (Extended Detection and Response) solution for threat security, consisting of two products: Microsoft 365 and Azure Defender.
- Microsoft 365 Defender helps you to stop attacks on Microsoft 365 services and automatically fixes obstacles. You can use this product even if you don't use Azure.
- Azure Defender provides innovative and advanced security for workloads running in Azure, on-premises, and other clouds.
The Azure Defender utility is integrated with the Security Center and has multiple security features that protect against threats, such as RDP attacks and SQL injections.
Why use Azure Defender?
You use Azure Defender to detect security problems and threats at an early stage. The defender allows you to act quickly when issues arise. You can also maintain your continuity. By enabling Azure Defender for your organization, it is possible to add custom initiatives and policies. In addition, you can add regulatory standards, such as NIST, Azure CIS, and the Azure Security benchmark.
Did you know that with the Azure Arc for Azure Defender, you can secure your Azure environment and your hybrid cloud environments, such as non-Azure services and virtual machines in other cloud environments - such as GCP and AWS? In addition, it is possible to divide between more and less critical alerts, all so you can focus on the most critical issues.
For which source types can you apply Defender in Azure?
You can use Azure Defender to secure and protect virtual machines, SQL databases, networks, containers, and more. Once you enable Azure Defender under 'Pricing and Settings,' then the screens of computing, service, and data layers for the following servers are activated simultaneously:
- Azure Defender for App Service
- Azure Defender for Open-Source Relational Databases
- Azure Defender for Storage
- Azure Defender for Kubernetes
- Azure Defender for Key Vault
- Azure Defender for Resource Manager
- Azure Defender for DNS
- Azure Defender for SQL
- Azure Defender for Container Registers
In the Security Centre, you can find all the details about the documentation of the subscriptions per server.
What are the costs associated with Azure Defender?
When you enable Azure Defender in Azure Security Center, all resource types are automatically activated and protected. Unless you specify that you do not want this, for the first 30 days, you can use Azure Defender for free.
Looking at the costs after this period, we see that the price differs per resource type. For example, in Western Europe, the cost for Azure Defender for App Service is 12.51 euros per month, while the monthly fee of Azure Defender for ACR is 0.25 euros per installation copy.
Want to understand the costs by resource type and know what you're spending per month? Then check out this pricing page from Microsoft.
Secure at Intercept
As a managed service customer of Intercept, you don't have to worry about the security of your platform. We'll ensure that everything is set up correctly in terms of safety and control with Azure Defender.
Is this something for you, but are you not yet a customer? Then take a look at our service plans.