Microsoft plays the name game with Microsoft Defender services

What you need to know

• Microsoft announced new names for several Microsoft Defender services.
• Several services also gained new integrations and capabilities.
• Microsoft Defender now includes Microsoft 365 Defender and Azure Defender.

Microsoft announced several new names for Microsoft Defender Services at Microsoft Ignite this year. Microsoft Defender, which now includes Microsoft 365 Defender and Azure Defender, identifies threats and protects devices across a wide range of platforms, including email, infrastructure, and cloud platforms.

Going forward, Microsoft Threat Protection will be known as Microsoft 365 Defender, which is an XDR for end-user environments.

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection is now Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, which brings protection from threats to mobile devices, including devices running iOS and Android.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the new name for Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection. This protection is now in public preview. With it, security professionals can prioritize protection for the most visible and targeted people within an organization.

Azure Security Center's cloud workload protection features are now referred to as Azure Defender. These are an XDR for Azure and hybrid resources, such as virtual machines, databases, and containers for IoT.

Azure Defender now supports Azure Arc, which helps it to protect SQL services which are on-premises. It also protects multi-cloud environments and virtual machines in other clouds.

Azure Security Center for IoT also has a new name, Azure Defender for IoT. Microsoft recently acquired CyberX, which increased the offering Microsoft can provide through Azure Defender for IoT. The service now has agentless security for IoT devices.

Microsoft Defender now integrates with SIEM Azure Sentinal, which can provide visibility and actionable insights across an entire enterprise. Azure Sentinal brings together data from Microsoft Defender, third-party systems, and Microsoft systems to provide end-to-end protection. This setup works with connectors, which allows it to get more data.

Office gains new features as well, including integration with Application Guard. These features are now in public preview and let Microsoft 365 E5 customers edit, print, and save changes to Office documents from outside of their own organization while maintaining protection.