I joined Microsoft a little more than six months ago—amid a global pandemic and a new norm of remote work, as well as one of the most rapidly evolving threat landscapes in history. We’ve witnessed more sophisticated attacks, like the recent SolarWinds incident, as well as an increase in attack surfaces as devices and online experiences have become more central to the way we work, learn, and live.
In solving these complex challenges alongside our customers and partners, Microsoft takes cybersecurity out of a place of fear and makes it about innovation and empowerment. Every single day, I am inspired by the team here, by their great wisdom, resilience, expertise, and by their commitment to living the mission we espouse.
Yesterday, Satya shared an important milestone for our security business: $10 billion in revenue in the past 12 months representing more than 40 percent year-over-year growth. A number inclusive of our security, compliance, identity and management businesses, and a testament to the trust our customers have placed in us.
What drives us now is creating a true Zero Trust mindset, which we believe is the cornerstone of effective protection, the foundation for organizational resilience, and the future of security. As part of that, I want to explain more about the work we do to help keep our customers secure, what makes us unique and a look at some of our latest innovations.
What makes us different
Our approach to security is unique in the industry. Microsoft has two security superpowers—an integrated approach and our incredible AI and automation. We tackle security from all angles—inside-out and outside-in. It’s why we combine security, compliance, identity, and management as an interdependent whole. In security, a silo is an opportunity for an exploit. No one else brings these critical parts of risk management together, not as a suite but as an approach that solves problems for customers on their terms across clouds and platforms.
Given Microsoft’s footprint across so many technologies, we’ve been in a unique position to think holistically about the core aspects of security: stretching from identity and access management; through endpoint, email, and application security; to data loss prevention and into cloud security and SIEM. We have an approach that is truly end-to-end, and it is notable in how deeply this is embedded in our culture. Microsoft’s security organization is an intense, massive collaboration that drives services, intelligence, technologies, and people—all coming together as one humming machine with a singular mission.
Next, consider the tremendous number of signals we take in across our platforms and services, over eight trillion security signals every 24 hours. Using the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques—plus the power of smart humans—we put these signals to work on behalf of our customers. In 2020 alone, almost six billion malware threats were blocked on endpoints protected by Microsoft Defender.
Today we help secure more than 400,000 customers across 120 countries. These range from small businesses to large enterprises, with 90 of the Fortune 100 using four or more of our security, compliance, identity, and management solutions.
Protecting our customers
Today’s world of security is really a cat and mouse game. You have to know what the adversaries and threat actors are up to every single day. However, a cyber-attack is ultimately about safety, a fundamental human need. We’ve seen what happens to people as they’re going through attacks, and it’s not pleasant. So, when we’re talking to customers around the world, our mission is really to give them peace of mind.
We can secure our customers best when we invest in these areas:
- All clouds, all platforms: We believe that anything less than comprehensive security is no security at all. That’s why our security, compliance, identity, and management solutions work seamlessly across platforms and we strive to extend to all clouds and all apps, whether or not Microsoft is being used throughout the computing environment. A great example of this is Azure Sentinel, our cloud-based SIEM, which in less than a year, is now helping over 9,000 customers protect their cloud workloads. Our commitment to comprehensive security is so absolute that we are empowering our customers to protect their cloud workloads wherever they are hosted, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. And likewise, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint now protects iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux.
- Simplicity in the face of complexity: In my first customer meeting at Microsoft, on which Satya joined me, a customer told me she just wanted a simple button that would make everything work—could Microsoft help? That really stuck with me. Our customers want to be enablers of innovation in their organizations, and they know that effective security is critical to that work. We must make it easier for them. We hear from our global user community that they want best-in-breed combined with best-in-integration. When faced with complexity, they want greater simplicity. It’s our mission to deliver that and help our customers adapt quickly to a changing world.
- A vibrant ecosystem: Microsoft welcomes and encourages an industry of strong competition that makes us all better. The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association is a community of more than 175 partner companies who have created over 250 integrations with Microsoft products and services, helping organizations close the gaps between fragmented security solutions and minimize risk. In addition, we delivered an industry record of $13.7 million in bug bounty awards to 327 researchers from more than 55 countries in fiscal year 2020, to help find and address potential vulnerabilities in our products and services before they can be weaponized by malicious actors.
Some new multi-cloud, multi-platform solutions and a look ahead
In addition to our financial news, today we are pleased to share a bit of product news.
Azure Security Center multi-cloud support is now available, including a unified view of security alerts from Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, as well as enhancements to Azure Defender to protect multi-cloud virtual machines. Today, we are also announcing the availability of Azure Defender for IoT, which adds a critical layer of agentless security for Operational Technology (OT) networks in industrial and critical infrastructure organizations; as well as Application Guard for Office, which opens documents in a container to protect users from malicious content. These new solutions help protect users and businesses across devices, platforms, and clouds.
According to the Microsoft identity 2020 app trends report, out today, providing secure remote access to resources, apps and data became the top challenge for business leaders in the past year. With Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), our cloud identity solution that provides secure and seamless access to 425 million users, organizations can choose from thousands of pre-integrated apps within the Azure AD app gallery, or bring their own apps. Microsoft Cloud App Security helps protect users, ensuring apps like Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow can be quickly adopted and safely managed. The enthusiasm we are seeing for both Azure AD and MCAS truly show the importance our customers are placing on secured third party applications.
Our work to make the world more secure for all really does extend to all—from the largest Fortune 100 companies and world governments to individuals. Last week we began rolling out new security features for Microsoft Edge including password generator and Password Monitor, as well as easier to understand options for managing data collection and privacy. We continue to invest in building solutions to help consumers stay more secure and look forward to sharing more in the future.
The milestones and announcements we have today give us an opportunity to celebrate the work of defenders around the world.
As we look to meet the challenges of the future, we’ll continue to invest in a vibrant ecosystem of partners and in building a competitive and cooperative industry that makes us all better. And we are laser-focused on delivering simplicity in face of complexity, so everything works, and our defender community is empowered to do more.
Ultimately security is about people, protecting people, bringing people together, sharing knowledge and tools to collectively strengthen our defenses. We look forward to sharing more in the coming months about new areas of focus and investment as we continue our commitment is to serve this community. We are for defenders, with defenders, and we are defenders ourselves. The fundamental ethos of our efforts is to make the world a safer place for all.
