Microsoft last week announced another acquisition, a few days after announcing the acquisition of RiskIQ. This next acquisition is CloudKnox Security, a vendor offering unified privileged access and cloud entitlement management. These technologies, sometimes also referred to as CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management), are essential for getting a grip on entitlements and access to cloud resources in multi-cloud and multi-hybrid environments.
Permission Management for hybrid cloud infrastructures
The CloudKnox Cloud Permissions Management Platform delivers a range of capabilities for managing privileges and access for cloud resources. This includes discovery and assessment of the state of privileges. It supports managing and optimizing privileges, for enforcing principles such as least privilege and need to know. It supports monitoring, auditing, and reporting, as well as forensics and incident response. Support spans the major clouds, but also virtualization environments such as VMware NSX, and management of server operating systems.
Extending PAM and hybrid cloud support in Microsoft 365
With that acquisition, Microsoft strengthens their Azure Active Directory offering, by further extending the reach into multi-cloud and multi-hybrid environments, but also extending the capabilities for managing privileged access entitlements and thus the breadth of its PAM (Privileged Access Management) capabilities. We expect to see integration of these technologies into the existing Microsoft stack of identity and security solutions soon.
Microsoft demonstrates with these acquisitions that identity and security are, for long, not just a by-product anymore, but one of the core pillars of their portfolio. Specifically, Microsoft is consequently extending its scope of solutions beyond the own ecosystem, serving the breadth of today’s heterogeneous IT environments.
