Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a family of independently licensed security services designed primarily to help secure resources running in Azure, other clouds, and on-premises. The Microsoft Defender for Cloud brand replaced the family of Azure Defender paid services and the free tier of Azure Security Center.

Service Overview

Although Microsoft does not group them as such, the security services available under the Microsoft Defender for Cloud brand umbrella can be organized into five loosely defined categories:

Workload defense services help customers protect application workloads running in Azure, like Azure VMs, Azure App Service, and Azure container-based application services running on Linux. Some services also support protecting VMs and physical servers in select configurations outside Azure. Workload defense includes the two tiers of Microsoft Defender for Servers, which are the typical way to license the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint service for use on Windows Servers and Linux servers.