Among further "granular visibility, continuous monitoring and automated remediation for hybrid and cloud permissions", users will also have governance, in the future, over the following:

• Automated and simplified access policy enforcement in one integrated multi-cloud platform for all human and workload identities.
• The widest breadth of signal-enabling, high-precision machine learning-based anomaly detections.
• Seamless integration with other Microsoft cloud security services, including Microsoft 365 Defender, Azure Defender and Azure Sentinel.

Today's announcement adds to a growing list of cloud-centric security acquisitions Microsoft has made over the past few months that include RiskIQ and ReFirm Labs.

In January, Microsoft said it had generated over $10 billion in security revenue in the previous 12 months, up more than 40% year over year, meaning that it’s growing faster than most other product areas. Just last week, Microsoft announced the acquisition of another security company, RiskIQ, which can spot threats across a given company’s entire information-technology footprint.Despite Microsoft's embroiled battle over exploits leveraged by various nation-states, it seems the company is attempting to sure up its cloud infrastructure offerings a bit better than those recently used in its Outlook Exchange solutions.

With CloudKnox onboard, Microsoft can offer greater Zero Trust monitoring in addition to more granular visibility and controls for companies in need of integrated privileged access and entitlement management tools with their cloud services.

Microsoft corporate vice president Joy Chik explained in a blog post that as unmonitored cloud services (like virtual machines) proliferate, it’s harder for organizations to keep a tight control over who’s allowed to do what with them. “High-profile breaches demonstrate how quickly bad actors can move laterally by exploiting misappropriated privileged credentials.”

The start-up was founded in 2015 and is based in Sunnyvale, California, with 58 employees listed on LinkedIn. Investors include Sorenson Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital and Foundation Capital.