Threat Detection: Azure Security Vs Sophos Cloud Optix

Intelligent threat detection is becoming a necessity for businesses as they encounter growing and increasingly complex intrusions. That coupled with migration of workloads to the cloud is motivating IT and security professionals to evaluate automation and tools that improve security operations and productivity. In this article, we have made a comparative study of two products, Microsoft Azure Security Center and Sophos Cloud Optix, to provide you with synopsis about their features and threat detection capabilities along with pricing details that would make it easier for you to decide the best option for your organization.

Threat Detection: Microsoft Azure Security Center

Features

To understand the features of Azure Security Center, let’s know the suite of products it offers under its umbrella.

Azure Defender

• Hybrid Cloud Security

Azure Defender provides you with hybrid cloud security services including servers, virtual machines, cloud native services, storage, data, networks, applications, and workloads that run on Azure, other clouds, and on-premises servers. It helps your organization to adhere to compliance regulatory standards.

• Powered by Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and automation

Automation and AI help quickly identify threats, cut through false alarms, and organize threat investigation. Threats identified include sql injection attacks and suspicious database activities. It also scans container images in the Azure container registry and suggests required course of action.

• Displays Detailed Reports

It provides a security score on the dashboard. For more information, see Secure Score in Azure Security Center. It helps you to view the compliance report, understand your company’s security requirements, generate reports, perform ongoing assessment, and take necessary actions.

• Makes Your Resources Efficient and Innovative

It helps improve the efficiency of your resources as it streamlines threat identification in accordance with the evolving threats with help of AI that makes threat detection intelligent. So, you can utilize your resources for more innovative work. It also detects unusual access to storage accounts and malware uploads to Azure Storage. It protects Azure Kubernetes Service instances.

• Endpoint Protection

Azure Defender for servers includes Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for comprehensive Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR).

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint protects Windows servers and clients as well as Linux servers with behavioral analytics. It helps in assessing application vulnerabilities in virtual machines with inbuilt vulnerability assessment.

Microsoft Defender uses Advanced post-breach detection sensors to collect a varied spectrum of behavioral signals. It helps in adapting to the changing threats as it provides cloud-powered, analytics-based, and post-breach threat detection. The threat intelligence feature helps in identifying attacking tools, procedures, and techniques.

Azure Arc

Azure Arc helps to integrate Azure Security across on-premises, multiple clouds, and edge to manage servers and Kubernetes clusters. This helps you to organize, secure, and govern resources anywhere and safely deploy applications and Azure Data Services to any infrastructure. This makes it easier to adopt to cloud practices on-premises and other clouds with central IT guidance and governance from Azure.

Pricing for Azure Security Center

Azure Defender pricing is based on the services you use. For more information, see Azure Defender Pricing.

Azure Arc pricing is based on server per month. For more information, see Azure Arc Pricing.

Threat Detection: Sophos Cloud Optix

Cloud Optix offers continuous monitoring, analysis, and visibility that your organization requires to identify security threats by being proactive and prevent security lapse.

• Hybrid Cloud Security

Cloud Optix comes with a host of features that helps you secure your applications in a multi-cloud environment. Cloud platforms supported include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and others. It helps your organization to detect potentially suspicious, malicious, or non-compliant activities by continuous monitoring and network topology visualization. It helps your organization to comply with both internal and external regulatory standards to confirm constant best practices across your organization’s cloud accounts.

• Powered by Artificial Intelligence

Cloud Optix is powered by artificial intelligence to monitor and detect intelligent threats. Thus, it provides smart alerts that are both accurate and actionable. A low number of high-priority alerts and zero critical alerts across the entire cloud help improve cloud management.

• Displays Detailed Reports

By analyzing network traffic and user activity logs proactive information of potential breaches is available. It provides you with a detailed inventory of assets on the cloud and a topological view of the environment’s architecture and traffic flows.

• Makes your resources efficient and innovative

It provides accurate security analytics, automated alert ranking, and contextual information to help your resources remediate security risks faster thereby preventing alert fatigue. As a result, you can utilize your resources for more efficient and innovative tasks.

• Endpoint Protection

Sophos Intercept X provides endpoint protection powered by artificial intelligence,
anti-ransomware, exploit prevention, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), and much more for Windows and macOS. If you have an Intercept X Advanced for Server with EDR term license, you can use Sophos Cloud Optix for EDR.

Pricing for Cloud Optix

Cloud Optix pricing is customized based on your requirements. For more information, see Cloud Optix Get Pricing.

For a comparison of threat detection on AWS read: Intelligent Threat Detection: AWS GuardDuty vs Sophos Cloud Optix.