What is the smallet unit for Defender for Cloud pricing?

kbastoon 0 Reputation points
2024-01-23T09:16:46.7333333+00:00

On the pricing page of Defender for Cloud, the rates can be displayed either by the hour or by the month. But there is no mention of the smallest unit of time for pricing. This information is crucial, especially for short-lived resources such as VM scale sets on Azure or auto-scaling groups in AWS, and it predominantly affects Defender CSPM and Defender for Servers plans Could you guide me to a reliable source where I can find more information on this topic?

Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
An Azure service that provides threat protection for workloads running in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds. Previously known as Azure Security Center and Azure Defender.
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  1. JamesTran-MSFT 36,541 Reputation points Microsoft Employee
    2024-01-23T23:10:36.5366667+00:00

    @kbastoon

    Thank you for your post!

    When it comes to Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing, I wasn't able to find any information on short-lived resources such as VMSS within the pricing page. To hopefully help point you in the right direction, from my understanding after reviewing the pricing page - VMSS should fall under a Compute resource (VM) and depending on your MS Defender for Servers Plan (1 or 2), you should be charged $0.007 (per Server per hour) or $0.02 (per Server per hour) respectively.

    • Note: Microsoft Defender CSPM protects across all your multi-cloud workloads, but billing only applies for Compute, Databases, and Storage resources. Billable workloads are VMs, Storage Accounts, OSS DBs, and SQL PaaS & Servers on Machines.

    However, since this question is more pricing related, I'd recommend reaching out directly to the Sales team via the Chat feature on the pricing page to get a more detailed answer.

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    I hope this helps!

    If you have any other questions, please let me know. Thank you for your time and patience throughout this issue.


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  2. kbastoon 0 Reputation points
    2024-02-09T13:18:56.3033333+00:00

    Well, after gleaning some information, the answer would be that the smallest unit is the hour. So, I'm assuming that each partial resource-hour consumed will be billed 1 hour Which is not really cloud-friendly, but this should answer the question.

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