What Does Darktrace & Microsoft’s Partnership Mean For Cloud Security?

Microsoft and autonomous cybersecurity AI company Darktrace, have entered into a partnership to provide customers with enterprise-scale, self-learning artificial intelligence to detect and respond to cyber threats in real time.

The partnership ensures enhanced security across different platforms and cloud environments, automates threat investigations and enables teams to prioritise strategic tasks.

UK-based Darktrace was founded in 2013. The company is a pioneer in using artificial intelligence to combat challenges in cybersecurity. Its proprietary machine learning and artificial intelligence-based algorithms understand and secure every network and device.

Darktraces’ solutions detect potential threats in real-time without configuration or tuning by learning standard patterns to discover unpredictable threats while delivering complete transparency across the workspace. The platform works with hundreds of organisations to provide cyber solutions to secure their cloud, email, traditional network and industrial systems with its “immune system” solutions.

The two companies have collaborated on three critical areas to address the challenges in cybersecurity.

Cyber email security: Microsoft is collaborating with Darktrace to avail its product Antigena Email, an autonomous AI threat assessment and combat product that understands the pattern of every user to look for anomalies. The product will be hosted on Microsoft Azure and listed on its marketplace to benefit mutual customers. Email security is challenging as email threats have become sophisticated, and employee awareness alone no longer cuts it. Antigena Email protects against impersonation attacks and analyses attachments and links to protect users.

Simplified and Streamlined Security Workflows:The integration of Darktrace with Azure sentinel, a security information and event management platform, will allow users to visualise Dartrace’s threat alerts and envision Darktrace alarms, and regulate cyber incidents inside the Azure sentinel platform. 

Seamless data integration: Microsoft’s collaboration with Darktrace will allow the integration of Darktrace’s AI technology to improve the detection and analysis of threats in Microsoft defender for the Endpoint platform. This will bring the benefits of Darktrace’s autonomous AI cybersecurity software to the users of Defender for Endpoint users. Its one-click integration will allow users of Microsoft defenders for Endpoint to avail the benefits by connecting both. The automatic investigation capability of Microsoft for Endpoint will be supplemented by Darktrace’s solutions.

Cybersecurity push

Microsoft has been heavily investing in cybersecurity in the past few years. This technology integration will enable Microsoft platforms to detect threats in real-time inside a self-contained autonomous system that doesn’t rely on prior information to known threats. It will identify subtle deviations from normal to detect known and unknown threats as they emerge. It will also transform the approach of cybersecurity at Microsoft with the application of AI. It will secure platforms against malicious software, ransomware, insider attacks, protect clients against phishing. The partnership will help Microsoft discover endpoint vulnerabilities and increase the capability of web protection by analysis of malicious IP addresses, domains, and URLs.

The addition of Darktrace’s product on the Azure marketplace will also increase the reach of its products and bring more enterprises into the fold of AI-based cybersecurity.

The integration of the two companies will upgrade the cybersecurity of platforms to involve AI on a much broader scale with surgical precision for data integration, threat assessment, and resolution. It will also disseminate awareness about automated, self-learning AI cybersecurity software. Besides making cloud platforms more secure, the change in approach will lead to advancement in cybersecurity because of the self-learning feature of Darktrace’s products.