How Defender for Cloud Apps helps protect your Azure environment
Article
Azure is an IaaS provider that enables your organization to host and manage their entire workloads in the cloud. Along with the benefits of leveraging infrastructure in the cloud, your organization's most critical assets may be exposed to threats. Exposed assets include storage instances with potentially sensitive information, compute resources that operate some of your most critical applications, ports, and virtual private networks that enable access to your organization.
Connecting Azure to Defender for Cloud Apps helps you secure your assets and detect potential threats by monitoring administrative and sign-in activities, notifying on possible brute force attacks, malicious use of a privileged user account, and unusual deletions of VMs.
Main threats
Abuse of cloud resources
Compromised accounts and insider threats
Data leakage
Resource misconfiguration and insufficient access control
How Defender for Cloud Apps helps to protect your environment
Connect Azure to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
This section provides instructions for connecting Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps to your existing Azure account using the app connector API. This connection gives you visibility into and control over Azure use. For information about how Defender for Cloud Apps protects Azure, see Protect Azure.
Note
User must be at least a Security administrator in Azure AD to connect Azure to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.
Defender for Cloud Apps displays activities from all subscriptions.
User account information is populated in Defender for Cloud Apps as users perform activities in Azure.
Currently, Defender for Cloud Apps monitors only ARM activities.
To connect Azure to Defender for Cloud Apps:
In the Microsoft Defender Portal, select Settings. Then choose Cloud Apps. Under Connected apps, select App Connectors.
In the App connectors page, select +Connect an app, followed by Microsoft Azure.
In the Connect Microsoft Azure page, select Connect Microsoft Azure.
In the Microsoft Defender Portal, select Settings. Then choose Cloud Apps. Under Connected apps, select App Connectors. Make sure the status of the connected App Connector is Connected.
Note
After connecting Azure, data will be pulled. You will see data from then onwards.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a cloud access security broker (CASB) that operates on multiple clouds. It provides rich visibility, control over data travel, and sophisticated analytics to identify and combat cyberthreats across all your cloud services. Learn how to use Defender for Cloud Apps in your organization.