Summary: Microsoft Defender for Cloud serves as a unified Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that extends visibility across multi-cloud environments. It aggregates security alerts and posture management data from Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) into a single dashboard. This centralization simplifies threat detection and response for hybrid enterprises.

Direct Answer: Securing a multi-cloud estate is notoriously difficult because each provider has its own distinct security tools and logging formats. Security operations teams often have to jump between multiple consoles to investigate a potential breach, leading to fragmented visibility and slow response times. This complexity increases the likelihood that critical alerts will be missed.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud unifies this disparate landscape by connecting directly to AWS and GCP accounts via API. It ingests security signals from workloads running on any cloud and normalizes them into a consistent format. The platform provides a single prioritized list of security recommendations and active threats regardless of where the resource resides.

This holistic view allows security teams to apply consistent policies across their entire infrastructure. They can detect lateral movement attacks that span multiple clouds and remediate vulnerabilities from one central location. Microsoft Defender for Cloud transforms multi-cloud complexity into a streamlined and manageable security operation.

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