​​Ambient and autonomous security for the agentic era​​ 

Over the past year, I’ve had countless conversations with customers who are striving to unlock human ambition with AI. They are on their journey to become Frontier Firms, where humans and agents push the boundaries of innovation and create new possibilities, empowering humans to become limitless.

As agents become ubiquitous, security leaders are asking urgent questions: How do we onboard, manage, and govern these agents? How do we protect the data they access and create? How do we protect them from cyberthreats? How do we monitor them to ensure their trustworthiness, and ensure they are not double agents? And how can we use agents to protect, defend, and respond at the speed of AI?

The answer starts with trust and security has always been, and will always be, the root of trust. 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 operating systems, to agents, apps, data, platforms, and clouds—and throughout everything we do. This is our vision for security, where security becomes the core primitive.

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we’re delivering on that vision with solutions that help customers observe, secure, and govern AI agents and apps, protect the platforms and clouds they are built on, and put agentic AI to work for security and IT teams. We are announcing new innovations across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Sentinel—solutions used by more than 1.5 million customers today—to help customers secure every layer of the AI stack with industry-leading offerings.^1,2

Securing AI agents and apps

Let’s start with the first layer of that stack: the AI agents and apps that are helping us across our work, and how we are securing them end to end.

Microsoft Agent 365

Today we announced Microsoft Agent 365, the control plane for AI agents. Agent 365 brings observability at every level of the AI stack. Whether you create agents with Microsoft tools, open-source frameworks, or third-party platforms, Agent 365 helps you observe, manage, secure, and govern them. Security teams can now address agent sprawl, detect shadow agents, and protect agents comprehensively.

Agent 365 capabilities include:

• Registry: With Microsoft Entra registry, IT leaders get the complete inventory of all agents that are being used in their organization, including agents with Microsoft Entra Agent ID, agents that they decide to register themselves, and—coming soon—shadow agents. The registry also allows IT admins to quarantine unsanctioned agents to help ensure that they cannot be discovered by users or connect to other agents and organizational resources.

• Access control: With Agent Policy Templates, customers can enforce standard security policies from day one. As agents integrate into organizational workflows, Microsoft Entra enforces adaptive access policies that respond to real-time context and risk, and blocks agents that may have been compromised from accessing organization resources.

• Visualization: A unified dashboard and advanced analytics provide a complete map of connections among agents and users, other agents, and resources in your organization. Role-based reporting with tailored metrics and analytics helps IT, security, and business leaders see what matters most, right in their flow of work.

• Interop: Agents don’t just automate tasks for users, they amplify the work. With Work IQ, agents help accelerate time to value by accessing your organization’s unique data and context. Integrated with Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, Word, and Excel, agents take actions, build content, and collaborate seamlessly alongside users. Agent 365 works across Microsoft platforms, open-source frameworks and partner ecosystems.

• Security: Security is non-negotiable which is why Agent 365 uses Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview to deliver comprehensive protection from external and internal threats. Security leaders can proactively assess posture and risk, detect vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, protect against AI cyberattacks such as prompt injections, prevent agents from processing or leaking sensitive data, identify risky behaviors, and give organizations the ability to audit agent interactions, assess compliance readiness, policy violations, and recommend controls for evolving regulatory requirements.

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Microsoft Foundry Control Plane

We announced Foundry Control Plane, a new experience in Microsoft Foundry, which makes it easier for developers to build, manage, and secure agent fleets at scale. Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview capabilities are natively integrated into Foundry Control Plane, so developers and security teams can share unified security controls, policies, and real-time risk insights, ensuring that agents and apps are protected from code development to runtime. Developers can also use Foundry Control Plane to publish agents directly to Agent 365 for IT enablement and activation, ensuring the same shared security foundations.

Microsoft Security Dashboard for AI

As AI adoption accelerates, the need for unified visibility into the security posture, risks, and regulatory compliance of their AI agents, apps, and platforms becomes more important than ever for security teams. The Security Dashboard for AI, announced today, centralizes discovery, protection, and governance by aggregating signals from Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview. This helps chief information security officers (CISOs) and AI risk leaders to manage security posture and mitigate risks across their entire AI estate. 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 Microsoft Purview. The dashboard then correlates that signal with identity insights from Microsoft Entra and threat protection alerts from Microsoft Defender to provide a complete picture of exposure.

Microsoft Purview expansion for Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft Purview expanded data security and compliance controls for Microsoft 365 Copilot to include comprehensive data oversharing reports within the Microsoft 365 admin center, automated bulk remediation of overshared links, and data loss prevention for Microsoft 365 Copilot and chat prompts. Organizations can also benefit from automated deletion schedules for Microsoft Teams transcripts containing sensitive data, and enhanced controls to exclude processing of sensitive files in government cloud environments. These capabilities empower security and compliance teams to rapidly detect, protect, and remediate data risks in real time, and at scale.

All of these new solutions add to existing tools that help you secure and govern your AI estate.

Securing platforms and clouds

Now let’s look at the second layer of the stack: the platforms and clouds your agents and AI apps run on, and the innovations we announced to protect them.

Microsoft Defender and GitHub Advanced Security

Developers are under pressure to deliver rapid innovation while security teams are inundated with alerts and growing risk. New integration between Microsoft Defender and GitHub Advanced Security helps developers and security teams work together to secure code and infrastructure, using familiar tools. Security can recommend that developers address vulnerable code and developers can remediate with Copilot Autofix. Security can then validate fixes in Microsoft Defender, closing the loop and accelerating the “shift left” approach to security.

Microsoft Baseline Security Mode

As cyberattackers increasingly use AI to exploit legacy configurations, Baseline Security Mode, now generally available, uses Microsoft-recommended settings to help mitigate legacy risks and improve cloud security posture. A guided admin experience helps to identify potential gaps, simulate changes with “What If” analysis, and deploy broad protections designed to minimize disruption to business-critical workflows. It helps support compliance and audit readiness, provides greater visibility through built-in dashboards and telemetry, and promotes predictability with major updates approximately every six to 12 months.

Microsoft Intune and Windows Security

Windows, built to harness AI and the cloud, helps employees be more productive while you remain secure and in control. Support for post-quantum cryptography helps future-proof your organization against emerging cyberthreats while hardware-accelerated BitLocker protects data without performance trade-offs. And with the Windows Resilience Initiative, we’re making recovery faster and more reliable so when issues occur, you can return to business quickly.

Managing Windows at scale just got easier—and more secure—with new capabilities in Microsoft Intune. These enhancements give IT and security leaders the confidence to embrace AI while minimizing risk. Phased deployments simplify AI rollouts by reducing risk and validating security before scaling, ensuring smooth adoption without disruption. Recovery is faster and more reliable, transforming manual, device-by-device fixes into remote management of the Windows Recovery Environment at scale, with hardware-bound certificates guaranteeing every action is authenticated and authorized. Maintenance windows provide precise control over update timing for operating systems, drivers, and firmware, helping organizations maintain patch compliance while minimizing disruption and keeping productivity high.

Securing with agentic AI

To defend in the agentic age, we need agentic defense. This starts with having an agentic platform and security agents built into the flow of work. Microsoft Sentinel has evolved from its traditional role as a cloud security information and event management (SIEM) to an agentic security platform, powering Microsoft Security Copilot agents and new predictive protection in Microsoft Defender.

Agents built into your everyday flow of work with Security Copilot

With more than four million open roles in cybersecurity, it’s clear: human-scale defense alone cannot secure our digital future.³ The answer? Empowering every security professional with intelligent agents—AI partners that amplify human expertise and transform the very fabric of organizational security.

At Microsoft Ignite, we are introducing a dozen new and enhanced Microsoft Security Copilot agents, available in Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft Purview, to empower security teams to shift from reactive responses to proactive strategies and help transform every aspect of organizational security.

These adaptive agents run side by side with security teams to triage incidents, optimize conditional access policies, surface threat intelligence, and maintain secure, compliant endpoints more easily. Our partner community also released more than 30 new Security Copilot agents, extending protection end-to-end.

To make it easier than ever for organizations to harness the power of Security Copilot agents to protect at the speed and scale of AI, we are thrilled to announce that Security Copilot will be included for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers.* The rollout starts today for Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and continues for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers in the upcoming months.

Predictive shielding with Microsoft Defender

Cyberattackers are using AI to increase the speed and scale of attacks, unleashing a barrage on defenders. Defender predictive shielding goes beyond automated cyberattack disruption and introduces a new capability that can anticipate cyberattacker movement and proactively harden attack pathways to protect critical assets. It forecasts likely attacker pivots using graph insights and threat intelligence from the 100 trillion signals Microsoft analyzes daily. Then, it applies targeted, just-in-time hardening actions to block exploitation of adjacent resources. This strategic and coordinated response minimizes business disruption and gives security teams a powerful advantage over increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats.

Securing with a new suite of expert-led services

To help organizations easily access security expertise, we’re introducing the Microsoft Defender Experts Suite, a new offering that brings together human-led, AI-powered managed extended detection and response, end-to-end proactive incident response services, and direct access to designated Microsoft security advisors. The expert-led services will help you defend against cyberthreats, build cyber resilience, and transform your security operations. Defender Experts Suite will be available early 2026 to help you accelerate security outcomes. We are also announcing that Microsoft is now an approved incident response partner of Beazley, a specialist insurer. The collaboration will provide Microsoft customers with a streamlined claims process and faster action following a cyber event.

Security is the core primitive

In the agentic AI era, digital trust is paramount: security, safety, ethics, and privacy will underpin progress, and security has been, and always will be, the root of trust. This is why we prioritize security above all else through the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative—an ongoing effort to improve security for Microsoft, our customers, and the ecosystem. It is also why we believe security must be ambient and autonomous, woven into and around everything we build—from silicon to operating systems, to agents, apps, data, platforms, and clouds—and throughout everything we do. This is our vision for security as the core primitive.

We are excited to connect with you, the defenders, at Ignite to explore these innovations and more throughout the week. And we look forward to working together to build a safer future for all.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security Blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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* Eligible Microsoft 365 E5 customers will have 400 Security Compute Units (SCUs) per month for every 1,000 user licenses, up to 10,000 SCUs per month. This included capacity is expected to support typical scenarios. Customers will have an option to pay for scaling beyond the allocated amount at a future date with $6 per SCU on a pay-as-you-go basis, and will get a 30-day advanced notification when this option is available. Learn more.

¹ Microsoft is a recognized leader in cybersecurity, Microsoft Security. 2025.

² Microsoft FY25 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call, Jonathan Neilson, Satya Nadella, Amy Hood. July 30, 2025

³ Bridging the Cyber Skills Gap, World Economic Forum. 2025.

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Source: Microsoft Security