Microsoft Intelligent Security Association grows to more than 80 members

Sometimes an idea sparks, and it feels so natural, so organic, that it takes on a life of its own and surprises you by how fast it grows. The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) was one of these ideas.

It was born out of a desire to be easy to do business with and be a better partner to our security peers—providing a single contact for all products in MISA, which reduces administrative work and serves as a central place for introductions to other engineering teams when you’re ready to build more integrations with Microsoft Security. In the spring of 2018, MISA launched with 26 founding partners, which included pivotal companies like Check Point, Zscaler, and F5. Just a year later, we had more than doubled in size, and as we head into Ignite 2019, the association has grown to 81 members—including new members RSA, eWBM, and ExtraHop.

“RSA is helping organizations secure their digital transformation journeys, addressing the growing number of threats, new digital risks and increasing sophistication of identity attacks in a hyper-connected world. The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association is an extension of our strategic partnership with Microsoft driving the common goal of better, more secure solutions for our customers and partners to enable organizations across the globe to secure their most critical assets.” —Jim Ducharme, Vice President of RSA Identity, Fraud & Risk Intelligence

MISA product updates

Three new products were added to the MISA product integration portfolio: Azure Sentinel, Azure Security Center (ASC), and ASC for IoT Security. The 11 product teams that make up the MISA product portfolio are announcing many product enhancements and partner integrations at Ignite 2019. Here are a few highlights:

Azure Sentinel

Enterprises worldwide can now keep pace with the exponential growth in security data, improve security outcomes and modernize their security operations with Azure Sentinel. As a cloud-native SIEM, Azure Sentinel helps security teams focus on the most important security events and removes the need to invest in infrastructure setup and maintenance. With analytics powered by built-in machine learning and automated playbooks, security teams can quickly detect and respond to previously unknown threats.

Azure Sentinel collects and analyzes security data from all sources across your enterprise—in Azure, on-premises and even other clouds. Azure Sentinel has built-in integrations with a growing list of MISA partners, including new integrations from Zscaler, F5, Barracuda, Citrix, ExtraHop, One Identity, and Trend Micro. These built-in connectors make it easy for the SecOps teams to collect and analyze security data easily while integrating with existing tools and threat intelligence.

Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center is extending its coverage with a new platform for community and partners to support Security Center’s fast growth in the marketplace and meet our customers’ demands around threat protection, cloud security posture, and enterprise-scale deployment and automation. We’re introducing new import and export API’s that will allow partners to share their recommendations into Security Center and get recommendations into their product consoles. Our customers can use Security Center to receive recommendations from Microsoft and solutions from partners such as Check Point, Tenable, and CyberArk.

Security Center’s simple onboarding flow can connect our customer’s existing solutions, enabling them to view their security posture recommendations in a single place, run unified reports and leverage all of Security Center’s capabilities against both built-in and partner recommendations. Our customers can also export Security Center recommendations to partner products.

Furthermore, Security Center is opening its gates for the security community to contribute and improve the policies and configurations used in Security Center. You can now use the Security Center community menu, the central hub of information for additional scripts, content, and community resources.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)

To help customers secure their entire application environment, we partnered with network security vendors—such as Akamai, Citrix, F5 Networks and Zscaler—making it simple to connect and protect your legacy-auth based applications. Integrating with these partners makes it possible for you to seamlessly connect with Azure AD without rewriting your applications that use protocols like header-based and Kerberos authentication.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has worked closely with our identity hardware partners to help drive the future of passwordless login by building integrations with the full suite of FIDO2-enabled Microsoft products including Windows 10 with Azure AD and Microsoft Edge with Microsoft Accounts. Today, MISA member Yubico announced the preview of the YubiKey Bio, which brings strong Windows passwordless login using biometrics for Azure AD users. With support for both biometric and PIN-based logins, the YubiKey Bio will leverage the full range of multi-factor authentication (MFA) capabilities outlined in the FIDO2 and WebAuthn standard specifications.

Microsoft Information Protection

Last year at Ignite, we made the Microsoft Information Protection SDK; it allowed our ecosystem of partners to participate in building integrations in a truly cross-platform way. Since then, many members of MISA have released in-market solutions that add to the Microsoft Information Protection value proposition.

Now, you can use Adobe Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader DC on the Windows and Mac OS desktop to open files protected with Microsoft Information Protection solutions, including Azure Information Protection (AIP) and Information Protection using Office 365. Acrobat Reader DC and Acrobat DC auto-detects a Microsoft Information Protection-protected file and prompts you to download the corresponding plugin. Once you download and install the plugin, the protected files open like any other PDF in Acrobat or Reader after authentication. You can also see the label information applied to PDF using Acrobat Reader DC and Acrobat DC.  Download the Microsoft Information Protection plugin from this Adobe page.

To learn more about the above announcements, check out these Ignite announcement blogs:

MISA at Ignite

As security becomes more mainstream, it’s reflected in the content you will see at Ignite. MISA hosted its first members pre-day in conjunction with the inaugural cybersecurity pre-day for Microsoft customers. As part of this event, MISA members shared expert insights and best practices on a range of security topics:

• Forcepoint—Unify Data Protection in a Hybrid IT World
• Morphisec—An ATT&CK Tactic Approach to Measuring Security and Risk
• Palo Alto—SOAR to the Clouds: Tackling Cloud Security in Your SOC
• Lookout—Mobile Threat Landscape in 2019
• Feitian—Go Passwordless with Fingerprint Biometrics for More Security

Learn more

To learn more about MISA, watch this two-minute video or visit the MISA webpage. To learn more about association members, visit the member catalog, or view the integration video playlist.

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