A security officer wants one continuously updated view of how securely the estate is configured — several Azure subscriptions, some accounts in another public cloud, and a rack of servers in an office — with prioritised recommendations and a single number to track improvement. Which service is that?
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), objective architecture-and-services. Azure architecture and services medium
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The options
Correct Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Correct. It continuously assesses resources against security recommendations, expresses the result as a secure score, and reaches beyond Azure to other clouds and, through Azure Arc, to servers running anywhere.
Not correct Azure Advisor
Wrong, although the two overlap on purpose. Advisor gives recommendations across cost, reliability, performance, security and operational excellence for Azure resources — and its security recommendations come from Defender for Cloud in the first place.
Not correct Azure Monitor
Wrong. Monitor collects and analyses telemetry — metrics, logs and alerts — so you can see what is happening. That is a different question from how securely things are configured.
Not correct Azure Policy
Wrong, though adjacent. Policy audits and enforces rules you have defined about resource configuration. It does not score your posture overall or detect threats against running workloads.
Why
Defender for Cloud does two jobs that are easy to conflate: posture management, which continuously assesses configuration and reports a secure score with prioritised recommendations, and workload protection, which detects threats against resources that are actually running. Its hybrid reach is the detail worth remembering — Azure Arc is what lets a server in somebody's office be assessed alongside a virtual machine in a subscription.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Microsoft AZ-900 study guide skill area architecture-and-services.identity-access-security
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