As Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO in February of last year, he did so on the back of a single mantra he reiterated over and over, “Mobile first, Cloud first.” At first blush, it may seem like a no-brainer to attribute smartphones and cloud sync services to Nadella’s corporate philosophy. However, Microsoft is reaching much broader than that these days.
Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Advance Threat Analytics (ATA) and Azure Rights Management support for the iPad. With today’s news, Microsoft is expanding the capabilities and services of customers who use its Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).
Coming out next month, the on-premises cyber security product will help businesses better identify advanced persistent threats before they can do any harm. According to Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Client and Mobility at Microsoft, Brad Anderson, “The biggest problem of all is, arguably, the question of how traditional IT security solutions operate once a breach occurs. Currently, the traditional infrastructure monitoring and security techniques have become less effective.”
Microsoft’s solution takes a new approach that intends to supports enterprise needs by using identity as a control panel, offering visibility and insights that derive from machine learning and multi-layer protection. Specifically, ATA uses technology gathered from Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Aorato and helps organizations navigate against targeted attacks using the following:
- It detects advanced security threats fast via behavioral analytics that leverage Machine Learning.
- Allows you to adapt to the changing nature of cyber-security threats with a technology that is continuously learning.
- It lets you narrow down the most important security factors using a simplified attack timeline.
- ATA’s innovative technology reduces false positive fatigue and raises red flags only when needed.
- ATA also helps to identify known malicious attacks, security issues and risks and presents all of this information in an easy-to-consume, and simple-to-drill-down, social media-like feed.
While the announcement of general availability was today, the ATA product will not be available for purchase until August 2015. However, in August customers will be able to buy ATA as a standalone service or part of a packaged EMS and Enterprise Client Access License (ECAL).
Continuing the trend of “Mobile first, Cloud first”, Microsoft is also offering Azure Rights Management support for Office for iPad in general availability. The Office team explains while using Office documents on iPad and iPhone, you can now view rights-protected documents natively within the Office application. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all display the protected content with full file fidelity, retaining the same viewing rights permissions originally assigned to the document.”
“While you can view the rights-protected documents with this release, the capability to create, edit and publish rights-protected documents will be released at a later date.” RMS support for Android devices looks to be on the docket for later this year as well.
As noted in yesterday’s quarterly earnings, Microsoft is seeing decent momentum in the enterprise cloud space. As part of its first fiscal year of EMS Brad and the Enterprise Mobility team also announced the inclusion of 17,000 customer purchases of Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility services. As the picture becomes clearer, Nadella’s words of “Mobile first, Cloud first’ seem to apply to Microsoft’s ability to deliver mobile experiences through the use of its extensive and secure cloud platform.
