Further strengthening its enterprise security offerings, Microsoft has acquired Israel based Aorato, a provider of enterprise security. With this acquisition, Microsoft will be able to better position itself towards enabling enterprise transformation in hybrid cloud segment.
In a blog post, Takeshi Numoto – Corporate Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Marketing, Microsoft, said, “I’m pleased to announce today that Microsoft has acquired Aorato, an innovator in enterprise security. We are making this acquisition to give customers a new level of protection against threats through better visibility into their identity infrastructure. With Aorato we will accelerate our ability to give customers powerful identity and access solutions that span on-premises and the cloud, which is central to our overall hybrid cloud strategy. We all know corporate security is more important than ever. Nearly every day there are more headlines about breaches, fraud and data loss. Unfortunately, compromised passwords, stolen identities and network intrusion are a fact of life,” he explained.
He further added that companies need new, intelligent solutions to help them adapt and defend themselves inside the network, not just at its edge. “Aorato’s sophisticated technology uses machine learning to detect suspicious activity on a company’s network. It understands what normal behavior is and then identifies anomalies, so a company can quickly see suspicious behavior and take appropriate measures to help protect itself,” he added.
Key to Aorato’s approach is the Organizational Security Graph, a living, continuously-updated view of all of the people and machines accessing an organization’s Windows Server Active Directory (AD). AD is used by most enterprises to store user identities and administer access to critical business applications and systems. Therefore, most of Microsoft enterprise customers should be able to easily take advantage of Aorato’s technology.
“This will complement similar capabilities that we have developed for Azure Active Directory, our cloud-based identity and access management solution. We are excited about the technology that Aorato has built and, especially, the people joining the Microsoft team through this acquisition. In the mobile first, cloud first era, Microsoft is committed to moving nimbly and aggressively to provide customers with solutions to their top challenges,” Takeshi Numoto, explained.
