Highlights –

  • Organizations will receive support from external security experts who hold the capability to conduct tasks like threat hunting and managed detection and response.
  • The firm will help on-site security teams to expand their competence with help from off-site Microsoft experts.

Microsoft announced the expansion of existing service capabilities and launched a new managed service category, Microsoft Security Experts, which aims to enable businesses to become more secure, compliant, and productive.

Two new services — Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting and Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR — have been released under the portfolio of Microsoft Security Experts, with a focus on security operations centres. There’s also a third service — Microsoft Security Services for Enterprises — which focuses on bigger enterprises.

With the new service, organizations will receive support from external security experts who hold the capability to conduct tasks like threat hunting and managed detection and response.

The service allows an organization’s on-site security teams to expand their competence with help from off-site Microsoft experts. Microsoft experts will probe the environment for security incidents and entrust contextual alert instructions with on-demand consultations to discuss specific incidents, nation-state actors, attack vectors, and recommendations for security improvement.

Besides, they will also provide remediation instructions to examine how the teams can respond. This means that security teams can get additional support from experts to manage their security, compliance, identity, and privacy strategies more effectively.

With Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, security operations centre users can receive support from Microsoft to hunt for threats proactively across Microsoft Defender data, including endpoints, Office 365, cloud applications, and identity.

As for Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR, as the name suggests, it is a managed XDR service that offers detection and response across Microsoft 365 Defender, alert investigations, and incidence response via automation and human expertise.

Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise contains proactive threat hunting and managed XDR through the tech giant’s security information and event management (SIEM) and XDR stack to protect cloud environments and platforms.

Surviving in a fast-paced threat landscape

With a spike in cyber-attacks, security teams are under duress to achieve more with less. This challenge is intensified by the fact that 62% of security teams are understaffed.

“Today’s threat landscape is incredibly fast paced. New campaigns surface all the time and the amount of damage that they can cause is not always immediately apparent,” said Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 security.

“Security Operations Centers (SOCs) must be equipped with tools and expert insight to identify and resolve potentially high-impact threats before attackers set up persistence mechanisms, steal data, or deploy ransomware.”

Lefferts believes that the three new managed service services launched by Microsoft will enhance the security teams’ capabilities.

Organizations with a robust SOC can leverage Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting later this summer. It will help them hunt for threats proactively. Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR, an extended managed detection and response service, will go into private preview this fall.

Lastly, the Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise, a managed service package, is ideal for bigger enterprises. It combines proactive threat hunting and managed XDR with support from dedicated Microsoft security experts.

MSS market in brief

The new managed security services have been launched at a time when the global MSS market is expected to grow from USD 22.8 billion in 2021 to USD 43.7 billion in 2026. Today, more organizations want to comply with complex government regulations and minimize the rise in security threats.

However, Microsoft is racing with several other providers who offer managed security services.

One of the top competitors is IBM, which recently raised USD 16.7 billion in revenue. Besides, it offers a fully managed security service with 24/7 threat management, managed detection and response, cloud security, and endpoint security.

Another competitor is Secureworks, one of the market leaders in this space. It offers a managed XDR solution called Taegis ManagedXDR, with threat hunting and incident response support. Only recently, the firm announced that it had raised USD 165 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

However, something sets Microsoft apart from these existing solutions, which is its expansive product ecosystem and the access to dedicated Microsoft security specialists, along with its training programs and threat intelligence.