The security landscape has become increasingly challenging and complex for all customers. Threats have grown at an alarming rate over the last year, and cybercrime is now expected to cost the world US$10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from US$3 trillion a decade ago and US$6 trillion in 2021.

Cybersecurity remains a big problem for organizations today. Threats continue to grow at alarming rates, wreaking havoc on organizations all over the world. Despite businesses continuing to increase their investments in cybersecurity, most threats still manage to infiltrate their cyber defenses.

According to statistics, the cost of cybercrime is expected to reach US$10.5 trillion annually by 2025, a US$3 trillion increase from a decade ago. For most businesses, the need to ensure their data and customers are secured and protected is a prerogative that can’t be taken likely.

In 2021, Microsoft Security blocked over 9.6 billion malware threats and more than 35.7 billion phishing and other malicious emails. Microsoft Security is actively tracking more than 35 ransomware families and 250 unique threat actors across observed nation-state, ransomware, and criminal activities, and its technology has blocked more than 900 brute force password theft attempts every second.

With cyber threats only expected to increase, Microsoft has announced new and expanded services for security under a new service category, Microsoft Security Experts. Security Experts includes three new managed services. They are:

• Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting – for customers who have a robust security operations center but want Microsoft to help them proactively hunt for threats across Microsoft Defender data, including endpoints, Office 365, cloud applications, and identity.
• Microsoft Defender Experts for extended detection and response (XDR) – a managed XDR service for customers who need to extend the capacity of their security operations center.
• Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise – designed for large enterprises, it combines proactive threat hunting and managed XDR, leveraging Microsoft’s complete security information and event management (SIEM) and XDR stack to protect all cloud environments and all platforms.

Microsoft is also moving two existing services to Microsoft Security Experts. They are Microsoft Security Experts for Modernization and Microsoft Security Experts for Incident Response.

According to Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance, and Identity at Microsoft, “As attacks increase in scale, so must our defenses. It’s getting harder every day for organizations to build and maintain a full security team, let alone one with the ever-expanding skillset required to meet the range of today’s security demands.”

Jakkal explained that Microsoft Security Experts combines expert-trained technology with human-led services to help organizations achieve more secure, compliant, and productive outcomes. It is Microsoft’s vision of delivering this category of services end-to-end, across security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy.

Interestingly, with more than 50% of organizations expected to be using managed detection and response services to contain threats by 2025, Microsoft will also be making an incremental multimillion-dollar financial investment this coming year in its managed XDR partner community.

Microsoft is expected to implement a new managed XDR partner designation within the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association (MISA) to unlock an expanded set of co-marketing benefits, and to ensure partner offerings are front and center in each customer conversation. The tech giant will also launch a new co-sell benefit for managed XDR partners, to help them build their business around Microsoft’s advanced security products as well as build new APIs to help ensure partners have access to Microsoft threat intelligence.