One of Microsoft Defender for Cloud's main pillars is cloud security posture management (CSPM). CSPM provides detailed visibility into the security state of your assets and workloads, and provides hardening guidance to help you efficiently and effectively improve your security posture.
Defender for Cloud continually assesses your resources against security standards that are defined for your Azure subscriptions, AWS accounts, and GCP projects. Defender for Cloud issues security recommendations based on these assessments.
By default, when you enable Defender for Cloud on an Azure subscription, the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB) compliance standard is turned on. It provides recommendations. Defender for Cloud provides an aggregated secure score based on some of the MCSB recommendations. The higher the score, the lower the identified risk level.
CSPM features
Defender for Cloud provides the following CSPM offerings:
Foundational CSPM - Defender for Cloud offers foundational multicloud CSPM capabilities for free. These capabilities are automatically enabled by default for subscriptions and accounts that onboard to Defender for Cloud.
Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) plan - The optional, paid Defender for Cloud Secure Posture Management plan provides more, advanced security posture features.
1: GCP sensitive data discovery only supports Cloud Storage.
2: DevOps security capabilities, such as code-to-cloud contextualization powering security explorer, attack paths, and pull request annotations for Infrastructure-as-Code security findings, are only available when you enable the paid Defender CSPM plan. Learn more about DevOps security support and prerequisites.
Integrations
Microsoft Defender for Cloud now has built-in integrations to help you use partner systems to seamlessly manage and track tickets, events, and customer interactions. You can push recommendations to a partner ticketing tool, and assign responsibility to a team for remediation.
Integration streamlines your incident response process, and improves your ability to manage security incidents. You can track, prioritize, and resolve security incidents more effectively.
DevOps security posture capabilities such as Pull request annotations, code to cloud mapping, attack path analysis, and cloud security explorer are only available through the paid Defender CSPM plan. The free foundational security posture management plan provides Azure DevOps recommendations. Learn more about the features provided by Azure DevOps security features.
For subscriptions that use both Defender CSPM and Defender for Containers plans, free vulnerability assessment is calculated based on free image scans provided via the Defender for Containers plan, as summarized in the Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing page.
Defender CSPM protects all multicloud workloads, but billing is applied only on specific resources. The following tables list the billable resources when Defender CSPM is enabled on Azure subscriptions, AWS accounts, or GCP projects.
1. Google Compute instances 2. Google Instance Group
Instances with nonrunning states
Storage
Storage buckets
- Buckets from classes: 'nearline', 'coldline', 'archive' - Buckets from regions other than: europe-west1, us-east1, us-west1, us-central1, us-east4, asia-south1, northamerica-northeast1