Chapter 6: Configuring an Advanced Threat Protection Solution

When you consider the modern IT landscape, one of the biggest challenges for IT departments is how to protect your users and data from the ever-changing, ever-more-advanced complex threats that can target your environment. In the Microsoft 365 world, where you have users, email, and documents in the cloud—or on a hybrid cloud—this is particularly challenging. It is not possible to wrap a traditional firewall around your Microsoft 365 tenant or to deploy an old-style anti-virus solution, and yet it is absolutely crucial that you do everything that you can to prevent malicious actors from gaining access to and disrupting your business' data and intellectual property.

Azure Advanced Threat Protection (Azure ATP) provides IT departments with the means to take preventative measures against modern threats and, in this chapter, we will discuss how Azure ATP works, as well as what the prerequisites and processes for configuring and implementing Azure ATP are. We will also review the Azure ATP sensor settings, which are used to examine data within your ATP instance. We will examine the Azure ATP health center, where you can see how your Azure ATP instance is performing, as well as view alerts and reports when there are problems. Finally, we will examine how Azure ATP is monitored and how to interpret security alerts.

We will cover these topics in the following order:

  • Identifying the organizational needs for Azure ATP
  • Setting up an Azure ATP instance
  • Managing Azure ATP activities