Microsoft is touting that they are offering machine learning as part of Azure Sentinel, something they call Azure Sentinel FUSION. I've written about it before here, and since general availability of Azure Sentinel it is enabled by default. You could easily be tricked into thinking that FUSION is marketing bingo, but nothing is truer: there are real machine learning models that help you in real world situations. One of the first that became available is named the "Advanced Multistage Detection". It was built on six years of experience with building machine learning modules for services such as Azure AD Identity Protection and such.

These built-in machine learning models are based on the learnings from the Microsoft security team over many years of defending our customer's cloud assets,

Six titans of industry stood onstage at MIT's Kresge Auditorium yesterday, assembled to speak on a panel about artificial intelligence (AI), including David H. Koch Institute professor Robert Langer; Helen Greiner, cofounder of iRobot, the Bedford-based company perhaps best known for its line of autonomous vacuum cleaners; Xiao'ou Tang, founder of computer vision startup SenseTime, which last year raised $1.2 billion in venture capital at a valuation of more than $4.5 billion; and Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Google. The discussion capped off a three-day celebration of MIT's new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, which will offer its first classes in physics, economics, biology, economics, machine learning, and related disciplines this fall. The panelists shared thoughts on a range of topics, but one they repeatedly touched on was entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs, Schmidt argued in his opening remarks, drive the economy -- they're spigots for ideas that form the basis of industries. "[Founders are] people who are filled with a vision -- something they care about -- and they personalize it, they believe in it, and they convince others to follow them," he said. But, he said, they're in "need [of] more juice."

Microsoft has announced two new cloud services to help administrators detect and manage threats to their systems. The first, Azure Sentinel, is very much in line with other cloud services: it's dependent on machine learning to sift through vast amounts of data to find a signal among all the noise. The second, Microsoft Threat Experts, is a little different: it's powered by humans, not machines. Azure Sentinel is a machine learning-based Security Information and Event Management that takes the (often overwhelming) stream of security events--a bad password, a failed attempt to elevate privileges, an unusual executable that's blocked by anti-malware, and so on--and distinguishes between important events that actually deserve investigation and mundane events that can likely be ignored. Sentinel can use a range of data sources.

Microsoft launched two cloud-based security tools, Azure Sentinel and Threat Experts, which use artificial intelligence to help security professionals respond to immediate threats more quickly. Azure Sentinel is designed to pull in large amounts of data from other cloud-based services -- Microsoft is billing the platform as a "cloud-native Security Information and Event Management tool." Sentinel lets users connect to and collect data from all sources including applications, servers, and devices running on-premises or in the cloud. The platform can also integrate with existing tools, whether business applications, other security products, or home grown tools, and users can add their own machine-learning models, as well as tailored detections, machine learning models and threat intelligence, the company said. Microsoft touts the AI's abilities to reduce noise from legitimate events with built-in machine learning and knowledge based on analyzing trillions of signals daily.

Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -0.17% announced Thursday it was throwing its hat into the AI-based security ring with the release of its Azure Sentinel product ahead of one of cybersecurity's biggest trade shows. In a briefing, Ann Johnson, who heads Microsoft's cybersecurity solutions group, said Azure Sentinel is the first native security information and event management, or SIEM, tool within a major cloud platform. In the push for an AI-based security platform, Johnson once again cited an estimate from research firm Cybersecurity Ventures that the industry faces a shortage of about 3.5 million qualified workers by 2022. Johnson said early adopters of Azure Sentinel have reported an up to 90% reduction of alert fatigue, where already stressed cybersecurity workers find themselves chasing what prove to be false alarms, and that threat-hunting times that used to take hours are being reduced to seconds. The company also announced its Microsoft Threat Experts product within Windows Defender, where users can click the "Ask a Threat Expert" button to submit questions directly to Microsoft staff.