Azure Security Center Enables Security Management

• Azure Security Center is increasingly becoming Microsoft’s preferred infrastructure security management offering.
• Azure Security Center offers a basic set of recommendations and alerting for free, but most capabilities such as Windows Defender ATP require the paid Standard tier.
• Most features are intended for use with VMs, but new services will integrate with Azure PaaS database services.

Azure Security Center is a Microsoft-hosted subscription-based service that helps organizations perform security management, monitoring, and alerting of Azure resources and, for limited scenarios, on-premises VMs. Security Center is the only way to license Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for instances of Windows Server and offers new security capabilities for monitoring SQL databases running in Azure. While a free tier of Security Center is available, the features that will be the most interesting to large organizations require the paid tier of service, and use of the service could become very expensive if not managed carefully.