Microsoft Partners with Palerra on Office 365 Security

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Looking to provide organizations moving to embrace Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud with additional security, Microsoft and Palerra, a provider of a LORIC cloud service that provides configuration management, threat detection, predictive analytics and incident response capabilities, announced a new partnership today.

Upa Hazarika, senior director of marketing and strategy for Palerra, says LORIC leverages application programming interfaces (API) to provide a layer of security services via the cloud for a broad range of cloud services, including Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com and Box.

LORIC makes uses of a machine learning platform that Palerra developed to continuously identify the attributes of any of the cloud computing environments its supports. Layered on top of that engine is a range of security services that address everything from automating incident responses to providing forensics that can be used to identify potential security issues before they occur, says Hazarika.

While organizations have been embracing cloud services in droves, partnering with Palerra allows Microsoft to provide IT organizations with a more granular level of control over who gets to access those services, and when. In addition, Microsoft is relying on Palerra to close the loop between when a potential breach is identified and when access to Microsoft Office 365 is shut down.

Whether it involves internal or external threats, IT organizations of all sizes have reservations about the security provided by any cloud service. But as security services in the cloud continue to evolve, it may very well soon turn out that they’ll have more control over security in the cloud than they ever did running the same applications on premise.