What is Microsoft Defender for DevOps?

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud technologies and DevOps practices, securing their applications and resources across multiple environments has become a critical priority. Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides comprehensive visibility, posture management, and threat protection across multicloud environments including Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-premises resources. Within this suite of services is Defender for DevOps, a powerful tool for managing DevOps security across multi-pipeline environments.

Defender for DevOps empowers security teams to protect applications and resources from code to cloud across multi-pipeline environments such as GitHub and Azure DevOps. The service uses a central console that provides a unified view of DevOps resources across multicloud environments. With this console, security administrators have full visibility into DevOps inventory and the security posture of pre-production application code. This includes findings from code, secret, and open-source dependency vulnerability scans.

Strengthening cloud resource configurations throughout the development lifecycle is another key capability of Defender for DevOps. This is achieved through the security of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates and container images, which minimizes cloud misconfigurations reaching production environments. By automating these security measures, security administrators can focus on critical evolving threats.

Defender for DevOps also helps security teams to prioritize remediation of critical issues in code. The service provides comprehensive code to cloud contextual insights within Defender for Cloud, which enables security administrators to help developers prioritize critical code fixes with Pull Request annotations. Additionally, developers can be assigned ownership of these issues by triggering custom workflows that feed directly into the tools they use and love.

Overall, Defender for DevOps helps unify, strengthen, and manage multi-pipeline DevOps security. Its capabilities enable security teams to streamline their security practices and automate security measures to minimize vulnerabilities in code and infrastructure. With Defender for DevOps, security teams can achieve comprehensive DevOps security across multi-pipeline environments, making their cloud environments more secure and resilient.