Microsoft Security Copilot to be available April 1 as a capacity-based service

Mary Jo Foley is the Editor in Chief at Directions on Microsoft. Before joining Directions, Mary Jo has worked as... more

Microsoft’s Security Copilot, its generative AI assistant for security professionals, will reach general availability (GA) on April 1. It will be available in multiple languages and all major geographies starting on that date and will be priced as a capacity-based service. Security Copilot customers will be billed monthly via a new Security Compute Unit (SCU) at the rate of $4 USD per hour.

Security Copilot is trained on 78 trillion security signals processed by Microsoft every day, as well as with information from external security agencies like the National Security Agency. Customers can train Security Copilot on their own data, too.

Originally announced in March 2023, Security Copilot has been in paid, private testing via Microsoft’s Early Access Program since October 2023. At release next month, Microsoft officials say, they expect Security Copilot to be most useful when it comes to incident summarization; impact analysis; reverse engineering of scripts; and guided incident response.

Security Copilot will be available via an immersive standalone portal and embedded experiences surfaced through various Microsoft security products, including Defender XDR, Sentinel, and Defender Threat Intelligence. Pricing will be the same for both the standalone and embedded experiences.

The only prerequisite for Security Copilot is Azure. Organizations will be able to provision Azure capacity to support their Security Copilot workloads. Security Copilot can work with as many or few Microsoft security offerings as a company has. Microsoft is working with third-party security providers — along with its own Entra ID, Intune management and Purview compliance teams — to integrate Security Copilot into their products.

Security Copilot: Pricing expectations

How much should a customer expect to spend on Security Copilot? Microsoft officials said it’s hard to project. A spokesperson sent the following when I asked for more pricing particulars:

“Depending on Copilot for Security usage, customers may need to provision more or less SCUs. There is no simplified mapping between an SCU and number of queries run by the customer because every prompt is different, workflows are of different sizes, scripts that need to be reverse engineered are of different lengths, so they are all going to utilize and burn SCU capacity differently. Customers should leverage the in-product dashboard to observe their usage patterns and adjust provisioned SCUs over time.

“In general, Microsoft recommends provisioning 3 SCUs per hour to start your Copilot for Security exploration.”

As a capacity-based service, Security Copilot’s pricing is different from that of many, but not all, of the existing Microsoft Copilots. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is available for a flat fee (prior to any negotiated discounts) for $30 per user per month.

Microsoft officials noted that “Microsoft is finalizing the pricing strategy for Microsoft Copilot for Security.”

“Security Copilot is an interesting starting point but will need to continue to evolve and expand to help organizations manage Microsoft’s expanding security footprint effectively,” said Directions on Microsoft analyst Wes Miller. “I also think that many customers expect this type of feature to be built in, since Microsoft typically charges extra for top-shelf security capabilities already.”