Microsoft Defender—Cybersecurity Solutions | Microsoft Security (original) (raw)

Frequently asked questions

• Microsoft Defender is a comprehensive threat protection solution designed to protect individuals, businesses, and enterprises from malicious cyberthreats. Its primary purpose is to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks across devices, identities, applications, email, data, workloads, and cloud environments.
  Key features include:
  • Threat Prevention and Detection: Advanced protection against malware, ransomware, phishing, and other cyberattacks.
  • Extended Detection and Response (XDR): Unified security across endpoints, identities, email, and apps for integrated protection.
  • Cloud Security: Helps identify misconfigurations and protect workloads in multicloud and hybrid environments.
  • Endpoint Protection: Enterprise-grade security for devices, including automated investigation and remediation.
  • Integration with Zero Trust Principles: Verifies every request and reduces attack surfaces.
  • Cross-Platform Support: Available on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS for individuals and families.
• Microsoft Defender products operate as a coordinated system that connects posture, protection, and detection and response. Signals from endpoints, identity, email, apps, and cloud are correlated to uncover exposure, identify risks early, and continuously reduce your attack surface. When threats occur, Defender moves beyond detection—disrupting attacks across domains, containing impact, and strengthening defenses over time through shared intelligence and automation.
• No. Many organizations start with endpoint protection to establish a strong security baseline and enable Defender’s predictive threat protection as a post-breach line of defense. As you expand into identity, email, apps, and cloud, Defender connects these layers—uncovering more attack paths and enabling coordinated attack disruption. Each additional workload adds context and coverage, strengthening your posture and increasing how effectively threats are prevented, contained, and remediated.
• Many security solutions provide strong protection within individual domains, but operate in silos. Microsoft Defender is built to work across your entire environment—connecting signals from endpoints, identity, email, apps, and cloud. This enables earlier threat prevention, coordinated attack disruption across domains, and continuous improvement of your security posture—reducing reliance on manual response and disconnected tools.
• Microsoft Defender is available as both standalone products and as part of broader Microsoft security offerings, including Microsoft 365 plans. This flexible approach allows you to start where you need and expand over time. As you adopt more Defender capabilities, integrated licensing delivers greater value—reducing the need for multiple point solutions and lowering overall cost while strengthening protection across your environment. See plans and pricing