Key takeaways from Microsoft Inspire 2023

Every July, Microsoft hosts its first major event of the US financial year to inspire its thousands of partners around the globe and kick-start exciting new programmes and initiatives. This time, we attended the Microsoft Security sessions and our CEO Federico Charosky joined the UK-specific sessions at Microsoft’s offices in London.

The slogan for the security part of Microsoft Inspire 2023 was ‘Springboard customers in the era of AI with end-to-end security’ and AI was certainly the name of the game.

As is often the theme at security conferences and presentations, Microsoft showed some very sobering cyber security statistics. Over the past 12 months, they have observed:

• A jump from 1,286 to over 4,000 password attacks per second
• A median of 72 minutes for a threat actor to access data after breaching a system
• A rise of 44% for data breaches from insider threats – these take an average of 85 days to mitigate.

And they estimate that the cyber security industry worldwide currently faces a skills shortage of 3.5 million people. At the present time cybercriminals have the advantage over anyone working to defend organisations.

Microsoft Security Copilot promises groundbreaking assistance

Microsoft promised to help tip the scales in favour of defenders with the use of a raft of new AI-empowered technologies, the first of which is Security Copilot. The first generative AI product in the cyber security industry, it’s promoted as the “the first security product to enable defenders to move at the speed and scale of AI”. During Inspire, Microsoft’s Vice President of Microsoft Security, Alym Rayani, said that the tool will “supercharge threat detection, investigation, remediation and defence”.

Currently in preview, Security Copilot will assist security analysts in being much more precise and efficient in identifying, containing and eradicating threats. Security Copilot will make life easier for anyone using Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Priva, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Entra and Microsoft Intune.

As a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Security, and one of the first anywhere in the world to be verified for our Managed Extended Detection & Response (XDR) service, we’ll be ready to adopt any AI benefits to help defend our customers.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing how our team can leverage Security Copilot and incorporate the new wave of AI tools into our existing services so that we can provide even stronger services to our customers worldwide,” says Paul Vasquez, Vice President of Alliances & Partnerships at Quorum Cyber.

Investing in innovation

Microsoft analyses over 65 trillion threat signals every day. In addition to Security Copilot, it has invested in over 300 security product innovations in the past 12 months, including in Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 E5, making its impressive portfolio of tools easier to use, more joined-up and more effective in the ongoing battle against cybercriminals.

“As a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Security, I’m incredibly excited to see Microsoft’s developments in AI and Security Copilot, specifically the efficiencies, results and impacts these can bring to our customers,” says Nathan Heard, Quorum Cyber’s Microsoft Alliance Manager. “As these solutions develop, Quorum Cyber is looking to lead the charge on how organisations can leverage the power of AI to defend against threats and mitigate cyber risk.”

Demonstrating our thought leadership alongside MISA

Working in close collaboration with Microsoft in the UK and the US, Quorum Cyber’s team members attend numerous Microsoft events and industry conferences throughout the year alongside our counterparts at the company. In May, as a guest of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) we were invited to demonstrate our XDR service at RSA Conference in San Francisco. And on 10th August we’ll be at the MISA Theater at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas to give a presentation titled “Outmaneuver Insider Threats: Generative AI for Risk Mitigation.”  So if you’re at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Vegas we hope to see you there.