If you want to protect your servers from cyber threats, you may be relying on Defender for Servers from Microsoft, a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Microsoft has now announced the direct onboarding of Defender for Servers without Azure Arc and is now officially available. Direct onboarding is a new feature that allows you to add the servers you want to protect to Defender for Servers without needing Azure Arc for Servers. In this blog post, I'll explain what this means, the benefits of this option, and who can benefit from it. I will also compare the new option with Azure Arc for Servers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Defender for Servers is a cloud-based service that provides threat detection and response capabilities for Windows and Linux servers. Defender for Servers helps you monitor your servers for malicious activity, detect and block attacks, investigate incidents, and respond to alerts - whether Windows or Linux. Defender for Servers is part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud (formerly Azure Security Center), which also includes Defender for Kubernetes, Defender for SQL, and Defender for IoT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To use Defender for Servers, the servers to be protected must be included in Defender for Cloud. This means that an agent must be installed on the servers to connect them to Defender for Cloud. Previously, this required Azure Arc for Servers, a service that extends Azure management and security to any server as an extension of Azure Resource Manager (ARM). With Azure Arc for Servers, you can manage your servers as if they were Azure resources, regardless of location or platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, some customers do not want to use Azure Arc for Servers for their server management. This can be for a variety of reasons, such as they already have other tools or processes in place that they don't want to replace. Or they have compliance or regulatory requirements that prevent them from using Azure Arc for Servers. With this latest announcement, Microsoft has listened and responded to varied customer feedback. For those customers who don't want to use Azure Arc, Microsoft has introduced a new option: Defender for Servers direct Onboarding. With this option, on-premises or multi-cloud servers can be directly onboarded without requiring Azure Arc for Servers. The previous unconditional dependency on Azure Arc has thus been removed. But what are actually the effective benefits from this new option?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The main advantage of this option is probably obvious. It is that the onboarding process is simplified and the dependencies and prerequisites are reduced. You don't need to install and configure the Azure Arc for Servers agent on the servers, which saves you time and resources. You therefore don't need to create and manage Azure resource groups or tags for your servers. In general, you don't have to deal with your Azure governance, or at least not as much, and therefore you don't have to prepare as much structure for successful onboarding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another advantage of direct onboarding is that you have more flexibility and choice in how you manage and secure your servers. This is because you can use Defender for Servers with direct onboarding in conjunction with other Microsoft or third-party tools or services. For example, you can continue to use System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to patch servers, while Defender for Servers handles threat protection. Onboarding via Azure Arc also allowed this flexibility, but the tool had to be configured unconditionally as the basis for onboarding to Defender for Servers. So here again we have to refer to the first, the main advantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n