Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a unified cloud security posture management (CSPM) and workload protection platform. It continuously monitors your Azure resources, hybrid servers, and multi-cloud environments (AWS, GCP) for security misconfigurations, threats, and vulnerabilities. It provides a prioritised list of recommendations to harden your environment and actively detects attacks in progress.

Defender for Cloud operates across two main pillars. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) evaluates your resource configurations against security best practices and compliance frameworks, assigning a Secure Score to your subscription. Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) — enabled via Defender plans — adds active threat detection, vulnerability scanning, and just-in-time VM access to protect running workloads.