Microsoft Unveils Agentic Security Capabilities

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00:00Microsoft is unveiling new agentic security capabilities to its Sentinel platform,

00:05hoping to offer a unified security offering in the age of AI.

00:08Joining us now to discuss this is Microsoft Security Corporate Vice President Vasu Chakal.

00:13And there's a raft of updates, Vasu, to offer a more centralized platform

00:18with improved security copilot with security store offerings.

00:23How is this actually going to make it easier for your clients to identify and then act on threats?

00:28Yeah, it's great to be here with you, Caroline.

00:31We live in unprecedented times as AI becomes mainstream,

00:35and we're seeing the rise of this frontier firm where agents and humans collaborate and work together.

00:41But all of this is happening against a backdrop of an escalated threat landscape.

00:46We're seeing 7,000 password attacks per second.

00:49Cybercrime is costing us $9.2 trillion.

00:52There's data risks and increasing concerns about AI accessing confidential data,

00:58and not to mention the complexity that defenders everywhere are facing.

01:02That's what today's announcement is about.

01:04It's about unifying security.

01:06It's about simplifying security.

01:08And it's about making sure that we can defend at agentic speed.

01:12The first part of that is Sentinel.

01:14We're expanding Sentinel to be the backbone of modern agentic defense.

01:19We're introducing new capabilities like graphs,

01:23which takes the trillions of signals that Sentinel processes

01:25and makes sure that we can convert this noise into insights.

01:30And defenders can see attack and attack patterns to proactively support.

01:34And then the second part is we are expanding security co-pilot,

01:38where we now have an agent builder that anyone can build their own agents using natural language

01:45and publish them in the security store so that it can be easily accessed.

01:49That backbone, Vasu, does it not make it a single point of failure, though?

01:54How are you going to be able to push back risks when you have got this unified approach in some way?

02:01We've always believed security is a team sport.

02:03And one of the advantages of having an end-to-end platform is the ecosystem that you can integrate with it.

02:10Today, on average, organizations have 40-plus tools, and they need that end-to-end visibility.

02:17So what Sentinel does is with its 350-plus connectors,

02:20it connects and brings security tools that organizations have into this data.

02:25And then we are building security into it grounds up so that we are not only adhering to security practices,

02:31but responsible AI practices as well, and helping organizations really with that comprehensive protection.

02:37We see AI not only as the aggressor, but as the defender in many ways when it comes to cybersecurity.

02:44With everyone being able to develop their own agents, how does one keep track of that in reality?

02:49What are you going to be having to do underneath the hood?

02:51Well, we're very excited about the superpowers that AI brings for defenders,

02:57because you're right, we need to use AI for defense.

03:00And it is going to change this asymmetry in the threat landscape.

03:04This is why we're introducing the security store,

03:06because now anyone can build an agent through security copilot,

03:10and they can publish it in the security store.

03:12It enables organizations to quickly discover what agents are available to them,

03:18right in the tools like Defender and Purview that Microsoft supports.

03:22I'm going to ask a sensitive question here, Vasu,

03:25but Microsoft has had its fair share of, shall I say, PR incidents,

03:30where vulnerabilities have attacked Microsoft's own offerings,

03:33and there has been concern about the level of security that has been on offer by the company.

03:37How have you managed to tackle that from a reality standpoint

03:40and from ultimately what you're seeing in the data?

03:44Yeah, Caroline, we have had many learnings,

03:46and we've also learned that we need to defend differently in this age of AI.

03:50In November 2023, we introduced our Secure Future initiative to address that very thing.

03:57It is the largest cybersecurity initiative in the industry,

04:00with the equivalent of 34,000 engineers working on it.

04:03It has a comprehensive way of looking at security, on securing identities,

04:08and securing production systems, engineering systems.

04:11But it's also about making sure we have 24 by 7 accelerated threat response and detections.

04:17More so, this has been a cultural transformation at Microsoft,

04:21that we've made security our number one priority,

04:24and we've made sure that security comes above all else.

04:27And not only security teams, but any team makes sure that they have security as their top priority.

04:34So this is some of the things that we are doing,

04:35and we are seeing our customers really learn from that and also use our best practices.

04:40It's interesting that you talk about that culture shift.

04:43A lot of that comes down to your own talent.

04:45How much have you had to beef up talent within the hiring practices at the moment?

04:50Because all we talk of is talent wars at the moment.

04:53Is it really fierce within the cybersecurity area as well?

04:57Yeah, cybersecurity is a cultural transformation.

05:00And as part of Secure Future Initiative, we've taken a big initiative on skilling and upskilling.

05:06We have a security academy at Microsoft where we are training every single employee

05:11to learn about how to do security in this new age of AI.

05:16And we also extend that training to our partner ecosystem and our customer ecosystem

05:20so we all can learn AI and we can learn security together.

05:24Let's talk about those partners and let's talk about the third-party tools in particular.

05:27How have you gone out there and decided to work alongside?

05:30You've got Zscaler, OneTrust, you've got IBM as well.

05:32What sort of integrations are you seeing?

05:34What sort of best practices have you worked on?

05:36Yeah, we're very, very grateful to our partner ecosystem.

05:40Security takes a village.

05:41It's a team sport.

05:42We have 350-plus connectors into Sentinel, which is our platform for AI security.

05:48And we continue to work with Zscaler, IBM, Cisco, and many others to make sure we have

05:52the right integrations into this platform.

05:55We have 15,000 partners globally that work together with Microsoft Security

06:00so that we can secure customers where they are at.

06:03We have 15,000 partners, and we have 15,000 partners, and we have 15,000 partners.

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