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What Flavor of Defender Would You Like?

Author by Chris Blackburn

Recently I had the opportunity to prepare a tasty spin on the Defender for Endpoint story for MMS Miami in October and the Minnesota Microsoft 365 User Group in December, and now I’m excited to share What Flavor Of Defender Would You Like? with the Microsoft 365 community.

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Being one of the 4 cores of the Microsoft Defender suite - Office 365 (Defender for Office 365), Identity (Defender for Identity), Apps (Defender for Cloud Apps), and Endpoints (Microsoft Defender for Endpoint) - this presentation start off with the 6 “main courses” of the Defender for Endpoint suite:

  • Enhanced Detection & Response
  • Threat & Vulneribility Management
  • Next Generation Protection
  • Attack Surface Reduction
  • Automatic Investigation
  • Threat Hunting Service

Each organization that we work with at Concurrency has its own “special sauce” when it comes to Defender. Whether you’ve satisfied with an existing suite of security products in your organization, or starving for a full security solution, Defender is happy to serve up as a full meal or just an appetizer. Then as you look to consume Defender, preparation is always the key to a great experience. Having the right ingredients and mixing it up right is the first step in planning out how you consume Defender for Endpoint in your environment. There’s no right or wrong combination of settings for your Defender story, and with 3rd party tools in the mix, it becomes of even more importance.

Since each organization has a security appetite of different sizes, understanding what costs look like before the bill comes is important – especially if you’re on a budget. Depending on how you’re serving up Defender in your environment, there are different license requirements so be sure to look at the menu closely so there’s no surprises. What’s great however is Microsoft has changed their core Defender for Endpoint features to be included in a very common suite: Microsoft 365 E3.

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After your “courses” have been prepared, now it’s time to prepare it for serving out to your clients. Servings can come in several different shapes and sizes, with ones being more intricate and require additional effort than the out-of-the-box features. The secrets to a preparation include:

  1. Assess your infrastructure
  2. Assess compatible platforms
  3. Assess application compatibility
  4. Choose the right architecture
  5. Onboard Pilot Devices
  6. Verify onboarding was successful
  7. Run Microsoft Defender for Endpoint’s evaluation tutorial
  8. Conduct an enterprise rollout

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With preparation successfully completed, and once you’re ready to consume defender, rest assured that Microsoft has all of your needs met thru covering all the core operating system platforms. As you start to consume each flavor of Defender for Endpoint, theres always a best way to consume it – as well as caveats you’ll want to look out for with each flavor:

  • PC
  • Mobile
  • Mac
  • Server
  • Linux

Satisfy all your endpoint security cravings in one savory meal, and the Microsoft Defender product is a formidable competitor and constant improvements are made to made it better than ever. Plus, there’s more great recipes from the Defender community!

 

View the Powerpoint presentation here

Watch the Youtube video of this Presentation at the MN M365 UG

Author

Chris Blackburn

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