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As businesses shift their operations from on-premises to the cloud, security has become a top priority. Cloud workloads are the applications, data, and other IT assets that run on cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Securing cloud workloads is essential to preventing unauthorized access, data breaches, cyberattacks, and compliance violations that could compromise the performance, availability, and integrity of your cloud services. Let’s explore what you can do to help protect your customers’ cloud environments.
Minimize the risks with a cloud workload protection platform
A cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) is a cloud security solution that helps protect cloud workloads—offering unified cloud workload protection across multiple providers. By using a CWPP, your customers can leverage the benefits of cloud computing while reducing the risks and challenges of cloud workload security.
According to a report by Wiz, a cloud security company, 50 percent of the public cloud environments they analyzed had at least one critical vulnerability associated with unsecured APIs. Examples of vulnerabilities associated with unsecured APIs include suboptimal access controls, weak authentication protocols, wrong rate limits, and accidental exposure. These oversights can leave the interfaces vulnerable to malicious activities, so it’s important to secure cloud workloads by using a CWPP that can monitor and remediate API-related issues in near real-time.
Why Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
For many, a CWPP is part of a larger cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). A CNAPP combines the workload protection tools from a CWPP along with cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions, which focus on the accounts associated with cloud applications.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a CSPM and CWPP designed to protect your customers’ cloud environments. Among other benefits, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can help your customers:
- Detect and respond to cyberattacks in real time across multiple cloud platforms, as well as on-premises workloads.
- Reduce attack surface by identifying and remediating vulnerabilities before they’re exploited and automatically safeguarding new workloads as soon as they’re deployed.
- Integrate their unified security operations platform and provide connected investigation and hunting with Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence.
- Customize their security with the right cloud workload protection plan for their resources, such as servers, storage, containers, databases, and APIs.
Figure 1. Microsoft Defender for Cloud pillars: Unify your DevOps security management, strengthen and manage your cloud security posture, protect your cloud workloads.
To learn more about Defender for Cloud, see:
- What is Microsoft Defender for Cloud?
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud product page
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing page
Earn partner incentives
Not only is Defender for Cloud a powerful technology for securing cloud workloads, as a Microsoft partner you can also earn incentives on it. Part of the Microsoft Commerce Incentives (MCI) portfolio, the Workload Acquisition & Nurture incentive (WANI) rewards qualifying partners for landing new workloads on Azure. WANI offers up to $9K per customer per workload for acquisition and 30 percent on month-over-month growth of partner-led Azure consumed revenue (PAL ACR) for nurture. This incentive is available to partners who deliver top-notch Azure solutions across various scenarios, such as security, migration, modernization, and hybrid.
Learn more
Cloud Workload Protection Solutions | Microsoft Security
Azure Foundations: Security & Defender for Cloud (microsoft.com)
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Join the conversation
Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.
