Microsoft acquires CloudKnox Security to offer unified privileged access and cloud entitlement management

Jul 21, 2021    |   Joy Chik - Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Identity

At Microsoft, we are committed to supporting organizations in their digital transformation and helping them to deliver secure and seamless experiences. Since IT modernization often spans multiple clouds, cloud security and identity are top of mind for most of our customers. Modern identity security needs to protect all users and resources consistently across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Today, Microsoft is taking a significant step toward this goal with the acquisition of CloudKnox Security, a leader in Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM). CloudKnox offers complete visibility into privileged access. It helps organizations right-size permissions and consistently enforce least-privilege principles to reduce risk, and it employs continuous analytics to help prevent security breaches and ensure compliance. This strengthens our comprehensive approach to cloud security.

As organizations adapt to hybrid work and more and more cloud services are deployed, new service entities that collaborate and exchange data without human interaction, such as virtual machines and containers, are proliferating. The growth of these service accounts and identities and their increasing volumes of permissions, privileges and entitlements exposes organizations to new attack vectors. Left in blind spots or uncontrolled, these permissions leave business critical systems open to infiltration and disruption. High-profile breaches demonstrate how quickly bad actors can move laterally by exploiting misappropriated privileged credentials.

Leave a Comment