Microsoft is doubling down on its cloud strategy and announced the acquisition of Adallom. Adallom offers transparent, cloud-based monitoring and alerting of cloud application use. It can detect if a user is performing suspicious actions (e.g. downloading the CRM database on a Friday afternoon). This signifies that cloud service provider vendors can no longer only offer IaaS security (see our Wave at https://www.forrester.com/The+Forrester+Wave+Public+Cloud+Platform+Service+Providers+Security+Q4+2014/fulltext/-/E-RES113065 ) but also help with understanding risks around non-sanctioned and sanctioned SaaS applications. Microsoft's success of incorporating Adallom's assets into the Azure portfolio will depend on the following:

1. How well will Azure AD premium work with Adallom?

2. How well will Office 365 work with Adallom?

3. How well  will Azure IaaS work with Adallom?

4. How Adallom will be able to support data protection and encryption?

5. How well Adallom will continue to work vendor agnostically with non-Microsoft IaaS and SaaS envrionments?

We will be publishing a Market Overview on Cloud Access Security Intelligence vendors (including Adallom) in Q3 of 2015. Stay tuned!