Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Security Center for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Azure Security Center for IoT was initially introduced in March 2019 alongside various other tools meant to secure IoT projects within corporate environments (such as Azure Sentinel, OPC Twin, OPC Vault, and more).
The solution was designed to provide organizations with IoT threat protection and security posture management across their entire IoT landscape, as it can identify emerging threats, help respond to them, and find issues that could allow attackers to breach an environment.
With more and more organizations deploying IoT in their environments (IDC expects IoT spending to surpass $1 trillion in 2022), the attack surface expands, creating opportunities for threat actors and cybercriminals to target the valuable data generated by IoT.
Azure Security Center for IoT, Microsoft says, aims to secure entire IoT deployments, including Microsoft and 3rd party devices. The solution can help prevent, detect, and remediate potential attacks.
What’s more, the tech giant points out, the solution covers all the different components that make up an IoT deployment, including small sensors, edge computing devices and gateways, Azure IoT Hub, and compute, storage, databases, and AI/ML workloads connected to these deployments.
“This end-to-end protection is vital to secure IoT deployments. Although devices may be a common target for attackers, the services that store your data and the admins who manage your IoT solution are also valuable targets,” the company says.
Introduced in 2016, Azure Security Center leverages Microsoft’s threat intelligence to create a list of potential threats, ranked by importance. Thus, it enables security pros and IoT admins remediate problems across devices, IoT services, connected Azure services, and the individuals who use them.
Additionally, Azure Security Center builds ranked lists of possible misconfigurations and insecure settings, so that admins can resolve the most important issues in their IoT security posture first. The data is drawn from Microsoft’s threat intelligence and industry standards, but customers can also port their data into SIEMs such as Azure Sentinel.
Related: Microsoft Launches Azure Security Center for IoT
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