Announcing public preview of custom graphs in Microsoft Sentinel
Today’s security attacks span identities, devices, resources, and activity, making it critical to understand how these elements connect to uncover real risk. In November, we shared how Sentinel graph brings these signals together into a relationship-aware view to help uncover hidden security risks. We’re excited to announce the public preview of custom graphs in Sentinel, available starting April 1 st . Custom graphs let defenders model relationships that are unique to their organization, then run graph analytics to surface blast radius, attack paths, privilege chains, chokepoints, and anomalies that are difficult to spot in tables alone. In this post, we’ll cover what custom graphs are, how they work, and how to get started so the entire team can use them. Custom graphs Security data is inherently connected: a sign-in leads to a token, a token touches a workload, a workload accesses data, and data movement triggers new activity. Graphs represent these relationships as nodes (entities) and edges (relationships), helping you answer questions like: “Who received the phishing email, who clicked, and which clicks were allowed by the proxy?” or “Show me users who exported notebooks, staged files in storage, then uploaded data to personal cloud storage- the full, three‑phase exfiltration chain through one identity.” Sentinel graph powers a growing set of graph-based experiences across Microsoft Security. But every organization also has unique relationships, like custom applications, business-critical resources, and third-party telemetry. Custom graphs let you build tailored security graphs for your unique scenarios using data from the Sentinel data lake as well as non-Microsoft sources. With custom graphs, powered by Fabric, you can build, query, and visualize connected data; uncover hidden patterns and attack paths; and surface risks that are hard to detect when data is analyzed in isolation. These graphs provide the knowledge context that helps AI-powered agent experiences work more effectively, speeding investigations, revealing blast radius, and helping you move from noisy, disconnected alerts to confident decisions at scale. In the words of our preview customers: “We ingested our Databricks management-plane telemetry into the Sentinel data lake and built a custom security graph. Without writing a single detection rule, the graph surfaced unusual patterns of activity and overprivileged access that we escalated for investigation. We didn't know what we were looking for, the graph surfaced the risk for us by revealing anomalous activity patterns and unusual access combinations driven by relationships, not alerts.” – SVP, Security Solutions | Financial Services organization Use Cases Sentinel graph offers embedded, Microsoft managed, security graphs in Defender and Microsoft Purview experiences to help you at every stage of defense, from pre-breach to post-breach and across assets, activities, and threat intelligence. See here for more details. The new custom graph capability gives you full control to create your own graphs combining data from Microsoft sources, non-Microsoft sources, and federated sources in the Sentinel data lake. With custom graphs you can: Understand blast radius – Trace phishing campaigns, malware spread, OAuth abuse, or privilege escalation paths across identities, devices, apps, and data, without stitching together dozens of tables. Figure 1: Blast Radius showing phishing email send to all recipients and who clicked and their proxy verdict Reconstruct real attack chains – Model multi-step attacker behavior (MITRE techniques, lateral movement, before/after malware) as connected sequences so investigations are complete and explainable—not a set of partial pivots. Reconstruct these chains from historical data in the Sentinel data lake. Figure 2: Drill into which specific MITRE techniques each IP is executing and in which tactic category Spot hidden risks and anomalies – Detect structural outliers like users with unusually broad access, anomalous email exfiltration, or dangerous permission combinations that are invisible in flat logs. OAuth consent chain - a single compromised user consented four dangerous permissions Creating custom graph Using the Sentinel VS Code extension, you can generate graphs to validate hunting hypotheses, such as understanding attack paths and blast radius of a phishing campaign, reconstructing multi‑step attack chains, and identifying structurally unusual or high‑risk behavior, making it accessible to your team and AI agents. Once persisted via a schedule job, you can access these custom graphs from the ready-to-use section in the graph experience in the Defender portal. Graphs experience in the Microsoft Defender portal After creating your custom graphs, you can access them in the Graphs section of the Microsoft Defender portal under Sentinel. From there, you can perform interactive, graph-based investigations—for example, using a graph built for phishing analysis to quickly evaluate the impact of a recent incident, profile the attacker, and trace paths across Microsoft telemetry and third-party data. The new graph experience lets you run Graph Query Language (GQL) queries, view the graph schema, visualize results, see results in a table, and interactively traverse to the next hop with a single click. Billing Custom graph API usage for creating graph and querying graph is billed according to the Sentinel graph meter. Get started To use custom graphs, you’ll need Microsoft Sentinel data lake enabled in your tenant, since the lake provides the scalable, open-format foundation that custom graphs build on. Use the Sentinel data lake onboarding flow to provision the data lake if it isn’t already enabled. Ensure the required connectors are configured to populate your data lake. See Manage data tiers and retention in Microsoft Sentinel | Microsoft Learn. Create and persist a custom graph. See Get started with custom graphs in Microsoft Sentinel (preview) | Microsoft Learn. Run adhoc graph queries and visualize graph results. See Visualize custom graphs in Microsoft Sentinel graph (preview) | Microsoft Learn. [Optional] Schedule jobs to write graph query results to the lake tier and analytics tier using notebooks. See Exploring and interacting with lake data using Jupyter Notebooks - Microsoft Security | Microsoft Learn. Learn more Earlier posts (Sentinel graph general availability) RSAC 2026 announcement roundup Custom graphs documentation Custom graph billingAuthorization and Identity Governance Inside AI Agents
Designing Authorization‑Aware AI Agents Enforcing Microsoft Entra ID RBAC in Copilot Studio As AI agents move from experimentation to enterprise execution, authorization becomes the defining line between innovation and risk. AI agents are rapidly evolving from experimental assistants into enterprise operators—retrieving user data, triggering workflows, and invoking protected APIs. While many early implementations rely on prompt‑level instructions to control access, regulated enterprise environments require authorization to be enforced by identity systems, not language models. This article presents a production‑ready, identity‑first architecture for building authorization‑aware AI agents using Copilot Studio, Power Automate, Microsoft Entra ID, and Microsoft Graph, ensuring every agent action executes strictly within the requesting user’s permissions. Why Prompt‑Level Security Is Not Enough Large Language Models interpret intent—they do not enforce policy. Even the most carefully written prompts cannot: Validate Microsoft Entra ID group or role membership Reliably distinguish delegated user identity from application identity Enforce deterministic access decisions Produce auditable authorization outcomes Relying on prompts for authorization introduces silent security failures, over‑privileged access, and compliance gaps—particularly in Financial Services, Healthcare, and other regulated industries. Authorization is not a reasoning problem. It is an identity enforcement problem. Common Authorization Anti‑Patterns in AI Agents The following patterns frequently appear in early AI agent implementations and should be avoided in enterprise environments: Hard‑coded role or group checks embedded in prompts Trusting group names passed as plain‑text parameters Using application permissions for user‑initiated actions Skipping verification of the user’s Entra ID identity Lacking an auditable authorization decision point These approaches may work in demos, but they do not survive security reviews, compliance audits, or real‑world misuse scenarios. Authorization‑Aware Agent Architecture In an authorization‑aware design, the agent never decides access. Authorization is enforced externally, by identity‑aware workflows that sit outside the language model’s reasoning boundary. High‑Level Flow The Copilot Studio agent receives a user request The agent passes the User Principal Name (UPN) and intended action A Power Automate flow validates permissions using Microsoft Entra ID via Microsoft Graph Only authorized requests are allowed to proceed Unauthorized requests fail fast with a deterministic outcome Authorization‑aware Copilot Studio architecture enforces Entra ID RBAC before executing any business action. The agent orchestrates intent. Identity systems enforce access. Enforcing Entra ID RBAC with Microsoft Graph Power Automate acts as the authorization enforcement layer: Resolve user identity from the supplied UPN Retrieve group or role memberships using Microsoft Graph Normalize and compare memberships against approved RBAC groups Explicitly deny execution when authorization fails This keeps authorization logic: Centralized Deterministic Auditable Independent of the AI model Reference Implementation: Power Automate RBAC Enforcement Flow The following import‑ready Power Automate cloud flow demonstrates a secure RBAC enforcement pattern for Copilot Studio agents. It validates Microsoft Entra ID group membership before allowing any business action. Scenario Trigger: User‑initiated agent action Identity model: Delegated user identity Input: userUPN, requestedAction Outcome: Authorized or denied based on Entra ID RBAC { "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/providers/Microsoft.Logic/schemas/2016-06-01/workflowdefinition.json#", "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0", "triggers": { "Copilot_Request": { "type": "Request", "kind": "Http", "inputs": { "schema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "userUPN": { "type": "string" }, "requestedAction": { "type": "string" } }, "required": [ "userUPN" ] } } } }, "actions": { "Get_User_Groups": { "type": "Http", "inputs": { "method": "GET", "uri": "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/@{triggerBody()?['userUPN']}/memberOf?$select=displayName", "authentication": { "type": "ManagedServiceIdentity" } } }, "Normalize_Group_Names": { "type": "Select", "inputs": { "from": "@body('Get_User_Groups')?['value']", "select": { "groupName": "@toLower(item()?['displayName'])" } }, "runAfter": { "Get_User_Groups": [ "Succeeded" ] } }, "Check_Authorization": { "type": "Condition", "expression": "@contains(body('Normalize_Group_Names'), 'ai-authorized-users')", "runAfter": { "Normalize_Group_Names": [ "Succeeded" ] }, "actions": { "Authorized_Action": { "type": "Compose", "inputs": "User authorized via Entra ID RBAC" } }, "else": { "actions": { "Access_Denied": { "type": "Terminate", "inputs": { "status": "Failed", "message": "Access denied. User not authorized via Entra ID RBAC." } } } } } } } This pattern enforces authorization outside the agent, aligns with Zero Trust principles, and creates a clear audit boundary suitable for enterprise and regulated environments. Flow Diagram: Agent Integrated with RBAC Authorization Flow and Sample Prompt Execution: Delegated vs Application Permissions Scenario Recommended Permission Model User‑initiated agent actions Delegated permissions Background or system automation Application permissions Using delegated permissions ensures agent execution remains strictly within the requesting user’s identity boundary. Auditing and Compliance Benefits Deterministic and explainable authorization decisions Centralized enforcement aligned with identity governance Clear audit trails for security and compliance reviews Readiness for SOC, ISO, PCI, and FSI assessments Enterprise Security Takeaways Authorization belongs in Microsoft Entra ID, not prompts AI agents must respect enterprise identity boundaries Copilot Studio + Power Automate + Microsoft Graph enable secure‑by‑design AI agents By treating AI agents as first‑class enterprise actors and enforcing authorization at the identity layer, organizations can scale AI adoption with confidence, trust, and compliance.Welcome to the Microsoft Security Community!
Microsoft Security Community Hub | Protect it all with Microsoft Security Eliminate gaps and get the simplified, comprehensive protection, expertise, and AI-powered solutions you need to innovate and grow in a changing world. The Microsoft Security Community is your gateway to connect, learn, and collaborate with peers, experts, and product teams. Gain access to technical discussions, webinars, and help shape Microsoft’s security products. Get there fast To stay up to date on upcoming opportunities and the latest Microsoft Security Community news, make sure to subscribe to our email list. Find the latest skilling content and on-demand videos – subscribe to the Microsoft Security Community YouTube channel. Catch the latest announcements and connect with us on LinkedIn – Microsoft Security Community and Microsoft Entra Community. Read the latest in the the Microsoft Security Community blog. Upcoming Community Calls March 2026 Mar. 31 | 8:00am | Microsoft Entra | Developer Tools for Agent ID: SDKs, CLIs & Samples Accelerate agent identity projects with Microsoft Entra’s developer toolchain. Explore SDKs, sample repos, and utilities for token acquisition, consent flows, and downstream API calls. Learn techniques for debugging local environments, validating authentication flows, and automating checks in CI/CD pipelines. Share ready-to-run samples, resources, and guidance for filing new tooling requests—helping you build faster and smarter. April 2026 Apr. 2 | 8:00am | Security Copilot Skilling Series | Current capabilities of Copilot in Intune This session on Copilot in Intune & Agents explores the current embedded Copilot experiences and AI‑powered agents available through Security Copilot in Microsoft Intune. Attendees will learn how these capabilities streamline administrative workflows, reduce manual effort, and accelerate everyday endpoint management tasks, helping organizations modernize how they operate and manage devices at scale. Apr. 7 | 9:00am | Microsoft Intune | Re‑Envisioned: The New Single Device Experience in the Intune Admin Console We’ve updated the single device page in the Intune admin center to make it easier to track device activity, access tools and reports, and manage device information in a more consistent and intuitive layout. The new full-page layout gives a single view for monitoring signals, supporting focus in dedicated views for tools and reports. Join us for an overview of these changes, now available in public preview. CANCELLED: Apr. 14 | 8:00am | Microsoft Sentinel | Using distributed content to manage your multi-tenant SecOps Content distribution is a powerful multi-tenant feature that enables scalable management of security content across tenants. With this capability, you can create content distribution profiles in the multi-tenant portal that allow you to seamlessly replicate existing content—such as custom detection rules and endpoint security policies—from a source tenant to designated target tenants. Once distributed, the content runs on the target tenant, enabling centralized control with localized execution. This allows you to onboard new tenants quickly and maintain a consistent security baseline across tenants. In this session we'll walk through how you can use this new capability to scale your security operations. RESCHEDULED Apr. 28 | 8:00am | Security Copilot Skilling Series | Security Copilot Agents, DSPM AI Observability, and IRM for Agents This session covers an overview of how Microsoft Purview supports AI risk visibility and investigation through Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Insider Risk Management (IRM), alongside Security Copilot–powered agents. This session will go over what is AI Observability in DSPM as well as IRM for Agents in Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry. Attendees will learn about the IRM Triage Agent and DSPM Posture Agent and their deployment. Attendees will gain an understanding of how DSPM and IRM capabilities could be leveraged to improve visibility, context, and response for AI-related data risks in Microsoft Purview. Apr. 30 | 8:00am | Microsoft Security Community Presents | Purview Lightning Talks Join the Microsoft Security Community for Purview Lightning Talks; quick technical sessions delivered by the community, for the community. You’ll pick up practical Purview gems: must-know Compliance Manager tips, smart data security tricks, real-world scenarios, and actionable governance recommendations all in one energizing event. Hear directly from Purview customers, partners, and community members and walk away with ideas you can put to work right immediately. Register now; full agenda coming soon! May 2026 May 12 | 9:00am | Microsoft Sentinel | Hyper scale your SOC: Manage delegated access and role-based scoping in Microsoft Defender In this session we'll discuss Unified role based access control (RBAC) and granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP) expansions including: How to use RBAC to -Allow multiple SOC teams to operate securely within a shared Sentinel environment-Support granular, row-level access without requiring workspace separation-Get consistent and reusable scope definitions across tables and experiences How to use GDAP to -Manage MSSPs and hyper-scaler organizations with delegated- access to governed tenants within the Defender portal-Manage delegated access for Sentinel. Looking for more? Join the Security Advisors! As a Security Advisor, you’ll gain early visibility into product roadmaps, participate in focus groups, and access private preview features before public release. You’ll have a direct channel to share feedback with engineering teams, influencing the direction of Microsoft Security products. The program also offers opportunities to collaborate and network with fellow end users and Microsoft product teams. Join the Security Advisors program that best fits your interests: www.aka.ms/joincommunity. Additional resources Microsoft Security Hub on Tech Community Virtual Ninja Training Courses Microsoft Security Documentation Azure Network Security GitHub Microsoft Defender for Cloud GitHub Microsoft Sentinel GitHub Microsoft Defender XDR GitHub Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps GitHub Microsoft Defender for Identity GitHub Microsoft Purview GitHubSecurity as the core primitive - Securing AI agents and apps
This week at Microsoft Ignite, we shared our vision for Microsoft security -- In the agentic era, security must be ambient and autonomous, like the AI it protects. It must be woven into and around everything we build—from silicon to OS, to agents, apps, data, platforms, and clouds—and throughout everything we do. In this blog, we are going to dive deeper into many of the new innovations we are introducing this week to secure AI agents and apps. As I spend time with our customers and partners, there are four consistent themes that have emerged as core security challenges to secure AI workloads. These are: preventing agent sprawl and access to resources, protecting against data oversharing and data leaks, defending against new AI threats and vulnerabilities, and adhering to evolving regulations. Addressing these challenges holistically requires a coordinated effort across IT, developers, and security leaders, not just within security teams and to enable this, we are introducing several new innovations: Microsoft Agent 365 for IT, Foundry Control Plane in Microsoft Foundry for developers, and the Security Dashboard for AI for security leaders. In addition, we are releasing several new purpose-built capabilities to protect and govern AI apps and agents across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview. Observability at every layer of the stack To facilitate the organization-wide effort that it takes to secure and govern AI agents and apps – IT, developers, and security leaders need observability (security, management, and monitoring) at every level. IT teams need to enable the development and deployment of any agent in their environment. To ensure the responsible and secure deployment of agents into an organization, IT needs a unified agent registry, the ability to assign an identity to every agent, manage the agent’s access to data and resources, and manage the agent’s entire lifecycle. In addition, IT needs to be able to assign access to common productivity and collaboration tools, such as email and file storage, and be able to observe their entire agent estate for risks such as over-permissioned agents. Development teams need to build and test agents, apply security and compliance controls by default, and ensure AI models are evaluated for safety guardrails and security vulnerabilities. Post deployment, development teams must observe agents to ensure they are staying on task, accessing applications and data sources appropriately, and operating within their cost and performance expectations. Security & compliance teams must ensure overall security of their AI estate, including their AI infrastructure, platforms, data, apps, and agents. They need comprehensive visibility into all their security risks- including agent sprawl and resource access, data oversharing and leaks, AI threats and vulnerabilities, and complying with global regulations. They want to address these risks by extending their existing security investments that they are already invested in and familiar with, rather than using siloed or bolt-on tools. These teams can be most effective in delivering trustworthy AI to their organizations if security is natively integrated into the tools and platforms that they use every day, and if those tools and platforms share consistent security primitives such as agent identities from Entra; data security and compliance controls from Purview; and security posture, detections, and protections from Defender. With the new capabilities being released today, we are delivering observability at every layer of the AI stack, meeting IT, developers, and security teams where they are in the tools they already use to innovate with confidence. For IT Teams - Introducing Microsoft Agent 365, the control plane for agents, now in preview The best infrastructure for managing your agents is the one you already use to manage your users. With Agent 365, organizations can extend familiar tools and policies to confidently deploy and secure agents, without reinventing the wheel. By using the same trusted Microsoft 365 infrastructure, productivity apps, and protections, organizations can now apply consistent and familiar governance and security controls that are purpose-built to protect against agent-specific threats and risks. gement and governance of agents across organizations Microsoft Agent 365 delivers a unified agent Registry, Access Control, Visualization, Interoperability, and Security capabilities for your organization. These capabilities work together to help organizations manage agents and drive business value. The Registry powered by the Entra provides a complete and unified inventory of all the agents deployed and used in your organization including both Microsoft and third-party agents. Access Control allows you to limit the access privileges of your agents to only the resources that they need and protect their access to resources in real time. Visualization gives organizations the ability to see what matters most and gain insights through a unified dashboard, advanced analytics, and role-based reporting. Interop allows agents to access organizational data through Work IQ for added context, and to integrate with Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, Word, and Excel so they can create and collaborate alongside users. Security enables the proactive detection of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, protects against common attacks such as prompt injections, prevents agents from processing or leaking sensitive data, and gives organizations the ability to audit agent interactions, assess compliance readiness and policy violations, and recommend controls for evolving regulatory requirements. Microsoft Agent 365 also includes the Agent 365 SDK, part of Microsoft Agent Framework, which empowers developers and ISVs to build agents on their own AI stack. The SDK enables agents to automatically inherit Microsoft's security and governance protections, such as identity controls, data security policies, and compliance capabilities, without the need for custom integration. For more details on Agent 365, read the blog here. For Developers - Introducing Microsoft Foundry Control Plane to observe, secure and manage agents, now in preview Developers are moving fast to bring agents into production, but operating them at scale introduces new challenges and responsibilities. Agents can access tools, take actions, and make decisions in real time, which means development teams must ensure that every agent behaves safely, securely, and consistently. Today, developers need to work across multiple disparate tools to get a holistic picture of the cybersecurity and safety risks that their agents may have. Once they understand the risk, they then need a unified and simplified way to monitor and manage their entire agent fleet and apply controls and guardrails as needed. Microsoft Foundry provides a unified platform for developers to build, evaluate and deploy AI apps and agents in a responsible way. Today we are excited to announce that Foundry Control Plane is available in preview. This enables developers to observe, secure, and manage their agent fleets with built-in security, and centralized governance controls. With this unified approach, developers can now identify risks and correlate disparate signals across their models, agents, and tools; enforce consistent policies and quality gates; and continuously monitor task adherence and runtime risks. Foundry Control Plane is deeply integrated with Microsoft’s security portfolio to provide a ‘secure by design’ foundation for developers. With Microsoft Entra, developers can ensure an agent identity (Agent ID) and access controls are built into every agent, mitigating the risk of unmanaged agents and over permissioned resources. With Microsoft Defender built in, developers gain contextualized alerts and posture recommendations for agents directly within the Foundry Control Plane. This integration proactively prevents configuration and access risks, while also defending agents from runtime threats in real time. Microsoft Purview’s native integration into Foundry Control Plane makes it easy to enable data security and compliance for every Foundry-built application or agent. This allows Purview to discover data security and compliance risks and apply policies to prevent user prompts and AI responses from safety and policy violations. In addition, agent interactions can be logged and searched for compliance and legal audits. This integration of the shared security capabilities, including identity and access, data security and compliance, and threat protection and posture ensures that security is not an afterthought; it’s embedded at every stage of the agent lifecycle, enabling you to start secure and stay secure. For more details, read the blog. For Security Teams - Introducing Security Dashboard for AI - unified risk visibility for CISOs and AI risk leaders, coming soon AI proliferation in the enterprise, combined with the emergence of AI governance committees and evolving AI regulations, leaves CISOs and AI risk leaders needing a clear view of their AI risks, such as data leaks, model vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and unethical agent actions across their entire AI estate, spanning AI platforms, apps, and agents. 90% of security professionals, including CISOs, report that their responsibilities have expanded to include data governance and AI oversight within the past year. 1 At the same time, 86% of risk managers say disconnected data and systems lead to duplicated efforts and gaps in risk coverage. 2 To address these needs, we are excited to introduce the Security Dashboard for AI. This serves as a unified dashboard that aggregates posture and real-time risk signals from Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview. This unified dashboard allows CISOs and AI risk leaders to discover agents and AI apps, track AI posture and drift, and correlate risk signals to investigate and act across their entire AI ecosystem. For example, you can see your full AI inventory and get visibility into a quarantined agent, flagged for high data risk due to oversharing sensitive information in Purview. The dashboard then correlates that signal with identity insights from Entra and threat protection alerts from Defender to provide a complete picture of exposure. From there, you can delegate tasks to the appropriate teams to enforce policies and remediate issues quickly. With the Security Dashboard for AI, CISOs and risk leaders gain a clear, consolidated view of AI risks across agents, apps, and platforms—eliminating fragmented visibility, disconnected posture insights, and governance gaps as AI adoption scales. Best of all, there’s nothing new to buy. If you’re already using Microsoft security products to secure AI, you’re already a Security Dashboard for AI customer. Figure 5: Security Dashboard for AI provides CISOs and AI risk leaders with a unified view of their AI risk by bringing together their AI inventory, AI risk, and security recommendations to strengthen overall posture Together, these innovations deliver observability and security across IT, development, and security teams, powered by Microsoft’s shared security capabilities. With Microsoft Agent 365, IT teams can manage and secure agents alongside users. Foundry Control Plane gives developers unified governance and lifecycle controls for agent fleets. Security Dashboard for AI provides CISOs and AI risk leaders with a consolidated view of AI risks across platforms, apps, and agents. Added innovation to secure and govern your AI workloads In addition to the IT, developer, and security leader-focused innovations outlined above, we continue to accelerate our pace of innovation in Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Defender to address the most pressing needs for securing and governing your AI workloads. These needs are: Manage agent sprawl and resource access e.g. managing agent identity, access to resources, and permissions lifecycle at scale Prevent data oversharing and leaks e.g. protecting sensitive information shared in prompts, responses, and agent interactions Defend against shadow AI, new threats, and vulnerabilities e.g. managing unsanctioned applications, preventing prompt injection attacks, and detecting AI supply chain vulnerabilities Enable AI governance for regulatory compliance e.g. ensuring AI development, operations, and usage comply with evolving global regulations and frameworks Manage agent sprawl and resource access 76% of business leaders expect employees to manage agents within the next 2–3 years. 3 Widespread adoption of agents is driving the need for visibility and control, which includes the need for a unified registry, agent identities, lifecycle governance, and secure access to resources. Today, Microsoft Entra provides robust identity protection and secure access for applications and users. However, organizations lack a unified way to manage, govern, and protect agents in the same way they manage their users. Organizations need a purpose-built identity and access framework for agents. Introducing Microsoft Entra Agent ID, now in preview Microsoft Entra Agent ID offers enterprise-grade capabilities that enable organizations to prevent agent sprawl and protect agent identities and their access to resources. These new purpose-built capabilities enable organizations to: Register and manage agents: Get a complete inventory of the agent fleet and ensure all new agents are created with an identity built-in and are automatically protected by organization policies to accelerate adoption. Govern agent identities and lifecycle: Keep the agent fleet under control with lifecycle management and IT-defined guardrails for both agents and people who create and manage them. Protect agent access to resources: Reduce risk of breaches, block risky agents, and prevent agent access to malicious resources with conditional access and traffic inspection. Agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, and Security Copilot get an Entra Agent ID built-in at creation. Developers can also adopt Entra Agent ID for agents they build through Microsoft Agent Framework, Microsoft Agent 365 SDK, or Microsoft Entra Agent ID SDK. Read the Microsoft Entra blog to learn more. Prevent data oversharing and leaks Data security is more complex than ever. Information Security Media Group (ISMG) reports that 80% of leaders cite leakage of sensitive data as their top concern. 4 In addition to data security and compliance risks of generative AI (GenAI) apps, agents introduces new data risks such as unsupervised data access, highlighting the need to protect all types of corporate data, whether it is accessed by employees or agents. To mitigate these risks, we are introducing new Microsoft Purview data security and compliance capabilities for Microsoft 365 Copilot and for agents and AI apps built with Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry, providing unified protection, visibility, and control for users, AI Apps, and Agents. New Microsoft Purview controls safeguard Microsoft 365 Copilot with real-time protection and bulk remediation of oversharing risks Microsoft Purview and Microsoft 365 Copilot deliver a fully integrated solution for protecting sensitive data in AI workflows. Based on ongoing customer feedback, we’re introducing new capabilities to deliver real-time protection for sensitive data in M365 Copilot and accelerated remediation of oversharing risks: Data risk assessments: Previously, admins could monitor oversharing risks such as SharePoint sites with unprotected sensitive data. Now, they can perform item-level investigations and bulk remediation for overshared files in SharePoint and OneDrive to quickly reduce oversharing exposure. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for M365 Copilot: DLP previously excluded files with sensitivity labels from Copilot processing. Now in preview, DLP also prevents prompts that include sensitive data from being processed in M365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, and Copilot agents, and prevents Copilot from using sensitive data in prompts for web grounding. Priority cleanup for M365 Copilot assets: Many organizations have org-wide policies to retain or delete data. Priority cleanup, now generally available, lets admins delete assets that are frequently processed by Copilot, such as meeting transcripts and recordings, on an independent schedule from the org-wide policies while maintaining regulatory compliance. On-demand classification for meeting transcripts: Purview can now detect sensitive information in meeting transcripts on-demand. This enables data security admins to apply DLP policies and enforce Priority cleanup based on the sensitive information detected. & bulk remediation Read the full Data Security blog to learn more. Introducing new Microsoft Purview data security capabilities for agents and apps built with Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry, now in preview Microsoft Purview now extends the same data security and compliance for users and Copilots to agents and apps. These new capabilities are: Enhanced Data Security Posture Management: A centralized DSPM dashboard that provides observability, risk assessment, and guided remediation across users, AI apps, and agents. Insider Risk Management (IRM) for Agents: Uniquely designed for agents, using dedicated behavioral analytics, Purview dynamically assigns risk levels to agents based on their risky handing of sensitive data and enables admins to apply conditional policies based on that risk level. Sensitive data protection with Azure AI Search: Azure AI Search enables fast, AI-driven retrieval across large document collections, essential for building AI Apps. When apps or agents use Azure AI Search to index or retrieve data, Purview sensitivity labels are preserved in the search index, ensuring that any sensitive information remains protected under the organization’s data security & compliance policies. For more information on preventing data oversharing and data leaks - Learn how Purview protects and governs agents in the Data Security and Compliance for Agents blog. Defend against shadow AI, new threats, and vulnerabilities AI workloads are subject to new AI-specific threats like prompt injections attacks, model poisoning, and data exfiltration of AI generated content. Although security admins and SOC analysts have similar tasks when securing agents, the attack methods and surfaces differ significantly. To help customers defend against these novel attacks, we are introducing new capabilities in Microsoft Defender that deliver end-to-end protection, from security posture management to runtime defense. Introducing Security Posture Management for agents, now in preview As organizations adopt AI agents to automate critical workflows, they become high-value targets and potential points of compromise, creating a critical need to ensure agents are hardened, compliant, and resilient by preventing misconfigurations and safeguarding against adversarial manipulation. Security Posture Management for agents in Microsoft Defender now provides an agent inventory for security teams across Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio agents. Here, analysts can assess the overall security posture of an agent, easily implement security recommendations, and identify vulnerabilities such as misconfigurations and excessive permissions, all aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Additionally, the new agent attack path analysis visualizes how an agent’s weak security posture can create broader organizational risk, so you can quickly limit exposure and prevent lateral movement. Introducing Threat Protection for agents, now in preview Attack techniques and attack surfaces for agents are fundamentally different from other assets in your environment. That’s why Defender is delivering purpose-built protections and detections to help defend against them. Defender is introducing runtime protection for Copilot Studio agents that automatically block prompt injection attacks in real time. In addition, we are announcing agent-specific threat detections for Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry agents coming soon. Defender automatically correlates these alerts with Microsoft’s industry-leading threat intelligence and cross-domain security signals to deliver richer, contextualized alerts and security incident views for the SOC analyst. Defender’s risk and threat signals are natively integrated into the new Microsoft Foundry Control Plane, giving development teams full observability and the ability to act directly from within their familiar environment. Finally, security analysts will be able to hunt across all agent telemetry in the Advanced Hunting experience in Defender, and the new Agent 365 SDK extends Defender’s visibility and hunting capabilities to third-party agents, starting with Genspark and Kasisto, giving security teams even more coverage across their AI landscape. To learn more about how you can harden the security posture of your agents and defend against threats, read the Microsoft Defender blog. Enable AI governance for regulatory compliance Global AI regulations like the EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF are evolving rapidly; yet, according to ISMG, 55% of leaders report lacking clarity on current and future AI regulatory requirements. 5 As enterprises adopt AI, they must ensure that their AI innovation aligns with global regulations and standards to avoid costly compliance gaps. Introducing new Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager capabilities to stay ahead of evolving AI regulations, now in preview Today, Purview Compliance Manager provides over 300 pre-built assessments for common industry, regional, and global standards and regulations. However, the pace of change for new AI regulations requires controls to be continuously re-evaluated and updated so that organizations can adapt to ongoing changes in regulations and stay compliant. To address this need, Compliance Manager now includes AI-powered regulatory templates. AI-powered regulatory templates enable real-time ingestion and analysis of global regulatory documents, allowing compliance teams to quickly adapt to changes as they happen. As regulations evolve, the updated regulatory documents can be uploaded to Compliance Manager, and the new requirements are automatically mapped to applicable recommended actions to implement controls across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Foundry. Automated actions by Compliance Manager further streamline governance, reduce manual workload, and strengthen regulatory accountability. Introducing expanded Microsoft Purview compliance capabilities for agents and AI apps now in preview Microsoft Purview now extends its compliance capabilities across agent-generated interactions, ensuring responsible use and regulatory alignment as AI becomes deeply embedded across business processes. New capabilities include expanded coverage for: Audit: Surface agent interactions, lifecycle events, and data usage with Purview Audit. Unified audit logs across user and agent activities, paired with traceability for every agent using an Entra Agent ID, support investigation, anomaly detection, and regulatory reporting. Communication Compliance: Detect prompts sent to agents and agent-generated responses containing inappropriate, unethical, or risky language, including attempts to manipulate agents into bypassing policies, generating risky content, or producing noncompliant outputs. When issues arise, data security admins get full context, including the prompt, the agent’s output, and relevant metadata, so they can investigate and take corrective action Data Lifecycle Management: Apply retention and deletion policies to agent-generated content and communication flows to automate lifecycle controls and reduce regulatory risk. Read about Microsoft Purview data security for agents to learn more. Finally, we are extending our data security, threat protection, and identity access capabilities to third-party apps and agents via the network. Advancing Microsoft Entra Internet Access Secure Web + AI Gateway - extend runtime protections to the network, now in preview Microsoft Entra Internet Access, part of the Microsoft Entra Suite, has new capabilities to secure access to and usage of GenAI at the network level, marking a transition from Secure Web Gateway to Secure Web and AI Gateway. Enterprises can accelerate GenAI adoption while maintaining compliance and reducing risk, empowering employees to experiment with new AI tools safely. The new capabilities include: Prompt injection protection which blocks malicious prompts in real time by extending Azure AI Prompt Shields to the network layer. Network file filtering which extends Microsoft Purview to inspect files in transit and prevents regulated or confidential data from being uploaded to unsanctioned AI services. Shadow AI Detection that provides visibility into unsanctioned AI applications through Cloud Application Analytics and Defender for Cloud Apps risk scoring, empowering security teams to monitor usage trends, apply Conditional Access, or block high-risk apps instantly. Unsanctioned MCP server blocking prevents access to MCP servers from unauthorized agents. With these controls, you can accelerate GenAI adoption while maintaining compliance and reducing risk, so employees can experiment with new AI tools safely. Read the Microsoft Entra blog to learn more. As AI transforms the enterprise, security must evolve to meet new challenges—spanning agent sprawl, data protection, emerging threats, and regulatory compliance. Our approach is to empower IT, developers, and security leaders with purpose-built innovations like Agent 365, Foundry Control Plane, and the Security Dashboard for AI. These solutions bring observability, governance, and protection to every layer of the AI stack, leveraging familiar tools and integrated controls across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview. The future of security is ambient, autonomous, and deeply woven into the fabric of how we build, deploy, and govern AI systems. Explore additional resources Learn more about Security for AI solutions on our webpage Learn more about Microsoft Agent 365 Learn more about Microsoft Entra Agent ID Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot Get started with Microsoft Copilot Studio Get started with Microsoft Foundry Get started with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Get started with Microsoft Entra Get started with Microsoft Purview Get started with Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager Sign up for a free Microsoft 365 E5 Security Trial and Microsoft Purview Trial 1 Bedrock Security, 2025 Data Security Confidence Index, published Mar 17, 2025. 2 AuditBoard & Ascend2, Connected Risk Report 2024; as cited by MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2025. 3 KPMG AI Quarterly Pulse Survey | Q3 2025. September 2025. n= 130 U.S.-based C-suite and business leaders representing organizations with annual revenue of $1 billion or more 4 First Annual Generative AI study: Business Rewards vs. Security Risks, , Q3 2023, ISMG, N=400 5 First Annual Generative AI study: Business Rewards vs. Security Risks, Q3 2023, ISMG, N=400
Authentication Context (Entra ID) Use case
Microsoft Entra ID has evolved rapidly over the last few years, with Microsoft continuously introducing new identity, access, and security capabilities as part of the broader Zero Trust strategy. While many organizations hold the necessary Entra ID and Microsoft 365 licenses (often through E3 or E5 bundles), a number of these advanced features remain under‑utilised or entirely unused. This is frequently due to limited awareness, overlapping capabilities or uncertainty about where and how these features provide real architectural value. One such capability which is not frequently used is Authentication Context. Although this feature is available for quite some time, it is often misunderstood or overlooked because it does not behave like traditional Conditional Access controls. Consider Authentication Context as a mobile “assurance tag” that connects a resource (or a particular access route to that resource) to one or several Conditional Access (CA) policies, allowing security measures to be enforced with resource-specific accuracy instead of broad, application-wide controls. Put simply, it permits step-up authentication only when users access sensitive information or perform critical actions, while maintaining a smooth experience for the “regular path.” When used intentionally, it enables resource‑level and scenario‑driven access control, allowing organizations to apply stronger authentication only where it is actually needed without increasing friction across the entire user experience. Not expensive Most importantly to use Authentication Context the minimum licensing requirement is Microsoft Entra ID Premium P1 which most customers already have this license. so you not need to convenience for higher license to utilize this feature. But do note Entra Premium 2 is needed if your Conditional Access policy uses advanced signals, such as: User or sign‑in risk (Identity Protection) Privileged Identity Management (PIM) protected roles Risk‑based Conditional Access policies The Workflow Architecturally, Authentication Context works when a claims request is made as part of token issuance commonly expressed via the acrs claim. When the request includes a specific context (for example c1), Entra evaluates CA policies that target that context and forces the required controls (MFA, device compliance, trusted location, etc.). The important constraint: the context must be requested/triggered by a supported workload (e.g., SharePoint) or by an application designed to request the claim; it is not an automatic “detect any action inside any app” feature. Lets look at few high level architecture reference 1. Define “assurance tiers” as contexts Create a small set of contexts (e.g., c1: Confidential Access, c2: Privileged Operations) and publish them for use by supported apps/services. 2. Bind contexts to resources Assign the context to the resource boundary you want to protect—most commonly SharePoint sites (directly or via sensitivity labels), so only those sites trigger the context. (e.g - Specific SharePoint sites like financials, agreements etc ) 3. Attach Conditional Access policies to the context Create CA policies that target the context and define enforcement requirements (Additional MFA strength, mandating device compliance, or location constraint through named locations etc.). The context is the “switch” that activates those policies at the right moment. 4. Validate runtime behavior and app compatibility Because authentication context can impact some client apps and flows, validate supported clients and known limitations (especially for SharePoint/OneDrive/Teams integrations). Some Practical Business Scenarios Scenario A — Confidential SharePoint Sites (M&A / Legal / HR) Problem: You want stronger controls for a subset of SharePoint sites without forcing those controls for all SharePoint access. Architect pattern: Tag the confidential site(s) with Authentication Context and apply a CA policy requiring stronger auth (e.g., compliant device + MFA) for that context. Pre-reqs: SharePoint Online support for authentication context; appropriate licensing and admin permissions; CA policies targeted to the context Scenario B — “Step-up” Inside a Custom Line-of-Business App Problem: Users can access the app normally, but certain operations (approval, export, privileged view) need elevated assurance. Architect pattern: Build the app on OpenID Connect/OAuth2 and explicitly request the authentication context (via acrs) when the user reaches the sensitive path; CA then enforces step-up. Pre-reqs: App integrated with Microsoft identity platform using OIDC/OAuth2; the app can trigger claims requests/handle claim challenges where applicable; CA policies defined for the context Scenario C — Granular “Resource-based” Zero Trust Without Blanket MFA Problem: Security wants strong controls on crown jewels, but business wants minimal prompts for routine work. Architect pattern: Use authentication context to enforce higher assurance only for protected resources (e.g., sensitive SharePoint sites). This provides least privilege at the resource boundary while reducing global friction. Pre-reqs: Clearly defined resource classification; authentication context configured and published; CA policies and monitoring. In a nutshell, Authentication Context allows organizations to move beyond broad, one‑size‑fits‑all Conditional Access policies and adopt a more precise, resource‑driven security model. By using it to link sensitive resources or protected access paths to stronger authentication requirements, organizations can improve security outcomes while minimizing unnecessary user friction. When applied deliberately and aligned to business‑critical assets, Authentication Context helps close the gap between licensing capability and real‑world value—turning underused Entra ID features into practical, scalable Zero Trust controls. If you find this useful, please do not forget to like and add your thoughts 🙂
Entra ID Private Access - data flow
Hello, I am successfully testing Entra Private Access. From outside, I can easily access my shared permissions. However, I have one more question. What happens if I my device on the internal network? If I access the shares directly, I get about 1GB/s. What happens if the "Global Secure Access" client is active? Do all the data go through the Entra portal, or just the authentication? If all the data go through the Entra portal, there could be challenges with the internet connection (all data in and out). Thank you for your support StefanSecurity Community Spotlight: Luca Romero Arrieche Heller
Meet Luca, Modern Workplace and Cloud Consultant at SoftwareOne Iberia, a Microsoft Partner. Luca has been working with Microsoft Security and cloud technologies for over a decade, closely following the evolution of the Microsoft Security ecosystem. Today, Luca focuses on Modern Work and security transformation projects, including large-scale Microsoft 365 migrations, enterprise messaging modernization with Exchange Online, endpoint management deployments with Microsoft Intune, and identity-driven security architectures across Microsoft environments. In addition to implementation projects, Luca also delivers technical workshops focused on threat protection and Microsoft security technologies, helping organizations better understand and implement solutions such as Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Entra ID, endpoint security, and Zero Trust strategies to strengthen their overall security posture. Here’s what Luca had to say about his winding road through Microsoft Security and its Community. All responses are quotes from Luca. Microsoft Security Community How would you describe your Microsoft Security Community involvement or advocacy, globally and/or locally? When did you begin? My involvement with the Microsoft Community began early in my career through regional Microsoft community and influencer programs in Brazil. During that time, I became involved with Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) and started writing security-focused technical articles based on real project experience. My early technical journey began working with on-premises technologies such as ISA Server, Exchange Server, and Active Directory, which provided a strong foundation in Microsoft infrastructure and security. Through community participation and my blog, I began documenting real-world implementations and lessons learned related to Microsoft Security and cloud technologies. Over the years, my professional work has remained closely connected to the Microsoft ecosystem, implementing technologies such as Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Entra ID, and Microsoft Intune in enterprise environments. Today, my community advocacy is strongly connected to real-world experience, focusing on Zero Trust architectures, identity protection, modern endpoint security, and large-scale Microsoft 365 transformations and migrations. I noticed you’ve also answered a number of questions and have helped provide solutions in Microsoft Tech Community forums. How did you come across this and what inspired you to help? I have always been encouraged to participate in the technical community and share knowledge. Since the early days of TechNet, I have been involved in learning from others and contributing whenever possible. The culture of collaboration within the Microsoft ecosystem played an important role in my professional development. Many of the challenges I faced early in my career were solved thanks to the knowledge shared by the community. Because of that, contributing back feels natural. In the Microsoft Security Tech Community forums, I often see questions that are very similar to challenges I face in my daily work as a consultant. Sharing my experience becomes a practical way to help others navigate similar situations. Experience is important not only for solving problems, but also for knowing where to look and how to approach a solution. When I see questions without answers or clear guidance, I try to contribute by sharing practical insights, troubleshooting approaches, and real-world solutions. What do you find most rewarding about being a member of the Microsoft Security Community? What I find most rewarding is knowing that the community played a direct role in shaping my professional journey. Early in my career, I learned extensively through forums, technical discussions, and shared knowledge. That collaborative environment enabled me to grow into increasingly complex enterprise projects. Over the years, I have followed the evolution of Microsoft Security solutions... the community has always been part of that journey. Today, being able to contribute insights gained from large-scale security architectures, identity modernization, and enterprise Microsoft 365 migrations is my way of giving back. Additionally, as a founding member of Microsoft Virtual Academy, I published security-focused technical articles and created my blog to document real-world implementations, always referencing sources and applied knowledge. Speaking of Microsoft Security solutions...which feature or product has provided the most impact? How has it helped you or your customers? The combination of Entra ID Protection with Conditional Access and the unified visibility of Defender XDR (are the Microsoft Security products that have) delivered the greatest impact by reducing compromised credential risks and accelerating incident response through identity, endpoint, and cloud workload correlation. Back to the Microsoft Community- what advice do you have for others who would like to get involved? My advice is simple: start by learning, then share what you have genuinely implemented in practice. The community values real-world experience, technical honesty, and genuine collaboration. It’s not about visibility — it’s about adding value. Be consistent, support others, and document your journey. Impact follows naturally. Linking up with Luca Do you have anything you’d like to promote or recommend? I recommend diving deeper into Intune, Defender, and Exchange Online, especially focusing on the integration between identity, endpoint protection, and email security within a well-structured Zero Trust Where can people get in touch with you or follow your content? LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucarheller GitHub: https://github.com/LucaARHeller Blog: https://lucaheller.wordpress.com/ Microsoft Tech Community: LucaHeller Please share anything else essential to you. Before thinking about advanced security tools, it is essential to understand how the underlying technologies work. Whether it is something simple like DNS resolution, how authentication flows operate, or how policies are applied across enterprise environments, these foundational concepts are what allow security architectures to be built correctly. For me, combining strong technical fundamentals with modern security technologies and real-world implementation experience is what enables organizations to build secure and resilient Microsoft environments. Luca’s story is a strong reminder of what makes the Microsoft Security Community thrive: practical contributions grounded in real-world experience. Through training, documenting, and showing up to help others, Luca demonstrates how continuous learning and compassion can benefit everyone. The community is better for his continued involvement, and his journey is an invitation for others to participate, share what they’ve learned, and keep strengthening security together. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Learn and Engage with the Microsoft Security Community Log in and follow this Microsoft Security Community Blog. Follow = Click the heart in the upper right when you're logged in 🤍. Join the Microsoft Security Community and be notified of upcoming events, product feedback surveys, and more. Get early access to Microsoft Security products and provide feedback to engineers by joining the Microsoft Security Advisors. Join the Microsoft Security Community LinkedIn Group and follow the Microsoft Entra Community on LinkedIn.Strengthening your Security Posture with Microsoft Security Store Innovations at RSAC 2026
Security teams are facing more threats, more complexity, and more pressure to act quickly - without increasing risk or operational overhead. What matters is being able to find the right capability, deploy it safely, and use it where security work already happens. Microsoft Security Store was built with that goal in mind. It provides a single, trusted place to discover, purchase, and deploy Microsoft and partner-built security agents and solutions that extend Microsoft Security - helping you improve protection across SOC, identity, and data protection workflows. Today, the Security Store includes 75+ security agents and 115+ solutions from Microsoft and trusted partners - each designed to integrate directly into Microsoft Security experiences and meet enterprise security requirements. At RSAC 2026, we’re announcing capabilities that make it easier to turn security intent into action- by improving how you discover agents, how quickly you can put them to use, and how effectively you can apply them across workflows to achieve your security outcomes. Meet the Next Generation of Security Agents Security agents are becoming part of day-to-day operations for many teams - helping automate investigations, enrich signals, and reduce manual effort across common security tasks. Since Security Store became generally available, Microsoft and our partners have continued to expand the set of agents that integrate directly with Microsoft Defender, Sentinel, Entra, Purview, Intune and Security Copilot. Some of the notable partner-built agents available through Security Store include: XBOW Continuous Penetration Testing Agent XBOW’s penetration testing agents perform pen-tests, analyzes findings, and correlates those findings with a customer’s Microsoft Defender detections. XBOW integrates offensive security directly into Microsoft Security workflows by streaming validated, exploitable AppSec findings into Microsoft Sentinel and enabling investigation through XBOW's Copilot agents in Microsoft Defender. With XBOW’s pen-testing agents, offensive security can run continuously to identify which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable, and how to improve posture and detections. Tanium Incident Scoping Agent The Tanium Incident Scoping Agent (In Preview) is bringing real-time endpoint intelligence directly into Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Security Copilot workflows. The agent automatically scopes incidents, identifies impacted devices, and surfaces actionable context in minutes-helping teams move faster from detection to containment. By combining Tanium’s real-time intelligence with Microsoft Security investigations, you can reduce manual effort, accelerate response, and maintain enterprise-grade governance and control. Zscaler In Microsoft Sentinel, the Zscaler ZIA–ZPA Correlation Agent correlates ZIA and ZPA activity for a given user to speed malsite/malware investigations. It highlights suspicious patterns and recommends ZIA/ZPA policy changes to reduce repeat exposure. These agents build on a growing ecosystem of Microsoft and partner capabilities designed to work together, allowing you to extend Microsoft Security with specialized expertise where it has the most impact. Discover and Deploy Agents and Solutions in the Flow of Security Work Security teams work best when they don’t have to switch tools to make decisions. That’s why Security Store is embedded directly into Microsoft Security experiences - so you can discover and evaluate trusted agents and solutions in context, while working in the tools you already use. When Security Store became generally available, we embedded it into Microsoft Defender, allowing SOC teams to discover and deploy trusted Microsoft and partner‑built agents and solutions in the middle of active investigations. Analysts can now automate response, enrich investigations, and resolve threats all within the Defender portal. At RSAC, we’re expanding this approach across identity and data security. Strengthening Identity Security with Security Store in Microsoft Entra Identity has become a primary attack surface - from fraud and automated abuse to privileged access misuse and posture gaps. Security Store is now embedded in Microsoft Entra, allowing identity and security teams to discover and deploy partner solutions and agents directly within identity workflows. For external and verified identity scenarios, Security Store includes partner solutions that integrate with Entra External ID and Entra Verified ID to help protect against fraud, DDoS attacks, and intelligent bot abuse. These solutions, built by partners such as IDEMIA, AU10TIX, TrueCredential, HUMAN Security, Akamai and Arkose Labs help strengthen trust while preserving seamless user experiences. For enterprise identity security, more than 15 agents available through the Entra Security Store provide visibility into privileged activity and identity risk, posture health and trends, and actionable recommendations to improve identity security and overall security score. These agents are built by partners such as glueckkanja, adaQuest, Ontinue, BlueVoyant, Invoke, and Performanta. This allows you to extend Entra with specialized identity security capabilities, without leaving the identity control plane. Extending Data Protection with Security Store in Microsoft Purview Protecting sensitive data requires consistent controls across where data lives and how it moves. Security Store is now embedded in Microsoft Purview, enabling teams responsible for data protection and compliance to discover partner solutions directly within Purview DLP workflows. Through this experience, you can extend Microsoft Purview DLP with partner data security solutions that help protect sensitive data across cloud applications, enterprise browsers, and networks. These include solutions from Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access and partners such as Netskope, Island, iBoss, and Palo Alto Networks. This experience will be available to customers later this month, as reflected on the M365 roadmap. By discovering solutions in context, teams can strengthen data protection without disrupting established compliance workflows. Across Defender, Entra, and Purview, purchases continue to be completed through the Security Store website, ensuring a consistent, secure, and governed transaction experience - while discovery and evaluation happen exactly where teams already work. Outcome-Driven Discovery, with Security Store Advisor As the number of agents and solutions in the Store grow, finding the right fit for your security scenario quickly becomes more important. That’s why we’re introducing the AI‑guided Security Store Advisor, now generally available. You can describe your goal in natural language - such as “investigate suspicious network activity” and receive recommendations aligned to that outcome. Advisor also includes side-by-side comparison views for agents and solutions, helping you review capabilities, integrated services, and deployment requirements more quickly and reduce evaluation time. Security Store Advisor is designed with Responsible AI principles in mind, including transparency and explainability. You can learn more about how Responsible AI is applied in this experience in the Security Store Advisor Responsible AI FAQ. Overall, this outcome‑driven approach reduces time to value, improves solution fit, and helps your team move faster from intent to action. Learning from the Security Community with Ratings and Reviews Security decisions are strongest when informed by real world use cases. This is why we are introducing Security Store ratings and reviews from security professionals who have deployed and used agents and solutions in production environments. These reviews focus on practical considerations such as integration quality, operational impact, and ease of use, helping you learn from peers facing similar security challenges. By sharing feedback, the security community helps raise the bar for quality and enables faster, more informed decisions, so teams can adopt agents and solutions with greater confidence and reduce time to value. Making agents easier to use post deployment Once you’ve deployed your agents, we’re introducing several new capabilities that make it easier to work with your agents in your daily workflows. These updates help you operationalize agents faster and apply automation where it delivers real value. Interactive chat with agents in Microsoft Defender lets SOC analysts ask questions to agents with specialized expertise, such as understanding impacted devices or understanding what vulnerabilities to prioritize directly in the Defender portal. By bringing a conversational experience with agents into the place where analysts do most of their investigation work, analysts can seamlessly work in collaboration with agents to improve security. Logic App triggers for agents enables security teams to include security agents in their automated, repeatable workflows. With this update, organizations can apply agentic automation to a wider variety of security tasks while integrating with their existing tools and workflows to perform tasks like incident triage and access reviews. Product combinations in Security Store make it easier to deploy complete security solutions from a single streamlined flow - whether that includes connectors, SaaS tools, or multiple agents that need to work together. Increasingly, partners are building agents that are adept at using your SaaS security tools and security data to provide intelligent recommendations - this feature helps you deploy them faster with ease. A Growing Ecosystem Focused on Security Outcomes As the Security Store ecosystem continues to expand, you gain access to a broader set of specialized agents and solutions that work together to help defend your environment - extending Microsoft Security with partner innovation in a governed and integrated way. At the same time, Security Store provides partners a clear path to deliver differentiated capabilities directly into Microsoft Security workflows, aligned to how customers evaluate, adopt, and use security solutions. Get Started Visit https://securitystore.microsoft.com/ to discover security agents and solutions that meet your needs and extend your Microsoft Security investments. If you’re a partner, visit https://securitystore.microsoft.com/partners to learn how to list your solution or agent and reach customers where security decisions are made. Where to find us at RSAC 2026? Security Reborn in the Era of AI workshop Get hands‑on guidance on building and deploying Security Copilot agents and publishing them to the Security Store. March 23 | 8:00 AM | The Palace Hotel Register: Security Reborn in the Era of AI | Microsoft Corporate Microsoft Security Store: An Inside Look Join us for a live theater session exploring what’s coming next for Security Store March 26 | 1:00 PM | Microsoft Security Booth #5744 | North Expo Hall Visit us at the Booth Experience Security Store firsthand - test the experience and connect with experts. Microsoft Booth #1843
