Forrester Consulting TEI Study: Azure Security Center delivers 219 percent ROI over 3 years and a payback of less than 6 months
Azure Security Center is a critical tool to secure our multi-cloud workloads in the new world of remote work we find ourselves in today. We are excited to share that Forrester Consulting has just conducted a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on behalf of Microsoft, which involved interviewing existing customers to create an accessible framework for organizations to evaluate the financial impact of Azure Security Center. The results are big—Azure Security Center delivers 219 percent return on investment (ROI) over three years and a payback of less than six months; reduces the risk of a cloud security breach by up to 25 percent, reduces time to threat mitigation by 50 percent, and reduces the cost of third-party security tools and services from consolidation by over $200,000 annually.
The Forrester study concluded that Azure Security Center reduces threat protection costs at scale, simplifies security posture management, and improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the Security Operations Center (SOC).
Forrester found that a composite organization experienced benefits of $3.56 million over three years versus costs of $1.1 million. This adds up to an ROI of 219 percent with payback in less than six months.
Cost Savings
Prior to using Azure Security Center, the customers were relying on multiple third-party cloud security tools implemented in different organizational siloes to understand their security posture and defend against potential threats. However, the distributed and disintegrated nature of this approach introduced inefficiencies into security workflows, produced a plethora of false-positive threat alerts, and limited visibility of the organization’s overall security posture, leading to potential security risk.
After the investment in Azure Security Center, the customers’ visibility into the security posture of their Azure workloads increased substantially, reducing the risk of cloud security breaches while also improving the productivity of security teams responsible for threat detection and remediation and security policy and regulatory compliance.
Forrester found that an organization experienced benefits of $3.56 million over three years versus costs of $1.1 million. This adds up to an ROI of 219 percent with payback in less than six months.
“We thought that if we could replace third-party tools with integrated Azure functionality, it might improve visibility. It might catch additional threats. It might ease configuration work, reducing management overhead in the end.”—IT security manager, professional services ¹
Reducing risk factors and time to respond
Forrester interviewed four customers with experience using Azure Security Center and aggregated the experiences of the interviewed customers, and combined the results into a single composite organization. This framework helps identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. According to aggregated data, Azure Security Center demonstrated strong benefits such as:
- Reduced risk of a cloud security breach by up to 25 percent. By improving visibility into an organization’s security posture across all its Azure workloads and decreasing time to threat remediation, interviewed organizations shared that they were able to reduce the risk of cloud security breaches.
- Reduced time to threat mitigation by 50 percent. Organizations that chose to also deploy Azure Defender within Azure Security Center shared that they were able to decrease their mean time to threat remediation by 50 percent. They were also able to reduce the number of threats needing remediation by 86 percent, thanks to false-positive threat alert reduction. Customers also benefitted from the fact that Microsoft’s scale and telemetry data enables Azure Security Center to update security recommendations and notify of important threats at speed.
- Reduction in time spent on security policy and compliance management up to 30 percent. Azure Security Center also reduced the amount of time spent on updating security policies and on compliance-related workflows by between 20 percent and 30 percent. This resulted in the improved productivity of security administrators.
- Reduced cost of third-party security tools and services from consolidation by over $200,000 annually. Customers shared that they reduced their spending and reliance on third-party security tools and services. Customers saved 20 percent to 30 percent on third-party security tools, reduced third-party security services by $180,000, and reduced third-party penetration test services by 50 percent.
- Reduced risk of non-compliance. Customers improved their compliance posture with the added visibility and accessibility of regulatory compliance status through Azure Security Center. They were also able to make recommended fixes to improve compliance they might have otherwise missed.
“Whenever we got a vulnerability report, we’d have a hard time hunting down who was responsible to make sure they would remediate the issue. With Azure Security Center, our teams have full visibility into vulnerabilities, and the recommendations that are applicable to them.”—Cloud Security Specialist, Retail ¹
Protect your hybrid cloud workloads today
You can start monitoring your security posture for free using Azure Security Center today. Microsoft recommends protecting all your hybrid cloud workloads with Azure Defender. You can try Azure Defender free for 30 days. Then pay as you go for the workload protection you choose.
Download the full Forrester Consulting study, The Total Economic Impact™ of Azure Security Center. Get started and learn more about Azure Security Center and Azure Defender. To develop a proof of concept study, please visit our POC guide.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
¹ Customer quotes shared in this blog are anonymous as they are part of the Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ of Azure Security Center study.
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