Also, today from Protocol, coverage of Microsoft’s approach to the shortage of cyber talent – and a consulting service aimed at enterprises and a managed offering in extended detection and response.
Two announcements. First, the launch of the new suite of services dubbed Microsoft Security Experts. Except for a few enterprises that run the “biggest and best” security operations centers globally, Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 Security, said he believes customers are currently looking for the type of security assistance these services seek.
According to Lefferts, the new services include Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR, which is the first managed version of Microsoft 365 Defender, the company’s XDR platform.
Microsoft’s managed XDR offering will let customers offload the remediation and investigation work that follows detection, and it’s meant for companies of all sizes.
A second new service, Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise, is targeted at companies seeking a consulting engagement around the security issues they’re facing.
This could include an analysis of the company’s security posture, offloading of security operations responsibilities, or incident response after a breach to ensure that an attacker has been fully evicted and the attack has been remediated, Lefferts said.
The third new service, Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, provides hunting for threats in a customer’s Microsoft Defender data. The service aims to uncover threats across a customer’s endpoints, identities, and cloud applications and threats found in Office 365 documents, emails, and collaboration.
Microsoft is among a handful of companies with such deep security experience and massive security operations to rival nation-states.. and it makes a lot of sense for them to offer the services. It’s Amazon’s original AWS model.
See the line on their approach – it’s a product based for the volume play and services-based for larger customers. That’s not to say they won’t scale this up for SMB, just that it’s in alignment with their approach in general. Microsoft Consulting generally pursues larger customers.