Dragos and Microsoft Unite OT Security on Azure and Sentinel

Dragos’s expanded collaboration with Microsoft marks a significant step toward bringing purpose-built operational technology (OT) security into mainstream enterprise cloud and security operations: the Dragos Platform will run on Microsoft Azure, push OT-specific telemetry and asset context into Microsoft Sentinel, and be purchasable through Microsoft Marketplace — with a SaaS deployment option slated to begin in Q1 2026 — creating a direct path for asset-intensive organisations to unify IT and OT detection, investigation, and response workflows inside environments they already use.

Background​

Industrial control systems, distributed automation, and other OT environments have historically been insulated from enterprise IT. That model is changing fast: plants, utilities, and other operational sites are increasingly instrumented, connected, and adopting cloud-based analytics and AI for operations, maintenance, and optimisation. The security consequence is straightforward — the attack surface for adversaries targeting physical processes is expanding at the same time that the window between initial compromise and operational impact is shrinking. Vendors and operators alike are racing to close a capability gap: traditional IT security tooling lacks the asset-aware, protocol-level visibility and OT-specific threat intelligence required to meaningfully protect cyber-physical systems.
The partnership announced by Dragos and Microsoft is a response to this market pressure. It combines an OT-focused security platform with one of the largest cloud and SIEM ecosystems in enterprise IT. The companies present the tie-up as enabling unified IT/OT security operations through native integrations — notably, the Dragos Platform’s telemetry and context will be ingested into Microsoft Sentinel, while procurement can be standardised through Microsoft Marketplace and aligned to Azure consumption commitments.
Industry market research underlines the urgency: analysts project the global OT security market to more than double between 2025 and 2030, reflecting rapid growth in investment across energy, manufacturing, utilities, transport and other asset-heavy sectors. That trajectory explains why major cloud and security providers are accelerating OT-focused strategies and partner integrations.

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Platform integration: what’s being connected — and why it matters​

How the integration is described​

Under the expanded collaboration, the Dragos Platform will deliver OT telemetry, asset inventories, and OT-specific threat intelligence into Microsoft Sentinel. The integration promises:

• A data connector or ingestion path that moves OT alerts, telemetry, and asset context into Sentinel’s analytics pipeline.
• Pre-built analytics and mapping so Dragos notifications can create Sentinel incidents with OT-aware entities and context.
• The ability to access raw OT data or alerts for custom queries and investigations inside Sentinel’s data lake and analytic environment.
• Content and automation packaging that reduces the friction of onboarding OT telemetry into existing SOC workflows.

Microsoft Sentinel, as a cloud-native SIEM and security data platform, already supports hundreds of connectors and partner content. The Dragos integration is pitched as bringing industrial protocol visibility and OT-focused detection logic into that ecosystem — enabling security teams to treat OT alerts as first-class inputs to standardised incident response playbooks, threat hunting, and automated SOAR (security orchestration, automation and response) actions.

Why OT data and context matter inside a SIEM​

OT environments are different from typical IT estates. Key differences include:

• Asset lifecycles measured in decades rather than years.
• Proprietary and legacy industrial protocols and control system telemetry.
• Safety and availability constraints that make disruption risk-driven trade-offs unavoidable.
• High value placed on precise asset context (e.g., which PLC controls which turbine) when assessing impact.

Feeding OT-specific signals and asset mapping into a SIEM means security analysts can correlate attacker activity across IT and OT domains, enrich alerts with operational impact, and automate response actions that respect plant safety and availability requirements. For enterprises already standardising around Sentinel, that is a major operational simplification.

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Deployment and procurement: SaaS on Azure, hybrid and on-premise continuity​

Deployment options and timing​

Dragos will continue to support on-premises and hybrid deployments while adding a SaaS option hosted on Azure, with the SaaS roll-out announced for Q1 2026. This matters because many industrial sites insist on localised control and sometimes air-gapped architectures; a one-size-fits-all cloud-only approach would not be viable for large parts of critical infrastructure. The multi-model approach gives organisations choice:

• On-premises: full local control where internet connectivity or cloud use is restricted.
• Hybrid: a mix of local data collection with cloud analytics and correlation.
• SaaS on Azure: managed, cloud-native SaaS for centralised visibility, scale, and easier updates.

From a technical standpoint, successful SaaS adoption for OT security depends on robust edge-to-cloud data collection mechanisms, deterministic latency profiles for telemetry forwarding, and clear models for keeping sensitive process data local when required.

Marketplace procurement and Azure consumption commitments​

Making Dragos available through Microsoft Marketplace streamlines procurement for customers that use Microsoft commercial channels and centralised vendor governance. The integration of Marketplace procurement with Azure consumption commitments (MACC) creates a commercial route where eligible purchases count toward an organisation’s Azure spend commitments — an attractive option for enterprises consolidating cloud budgets or seeking to align security investments with broader Azure consumption.
There are caveats: not all Marketplace offers are MACC-eligible. Free and BYOL (bring-your-own-license) offers are typically non-transactable and therefore do not contribute to MACC. Also, MACC benefits generally apply to licenses or software used exclusively in Azure; hybrid or on-premise deployments may not be MACC-eligible. Organisations should verify the offer’s MACC registration and whether licencing models suit their hybrid estates before relying on consumption credits as the primary economics driver.

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Security operations impact: unifying IT and OT workflows​

What a unified view enables​

Bringing OT signals into Sentinel enables security teams to:

• Correlate network and identity anomalies in IT with operational anomalies in OT to identify cross-domain attack paths.
• Enrich IT alerts with OT asset context to prioritise investigations based on potential safety or availability impact.
• Use existing SOC playbooks, case management, and analyst tooling to track OT incidents the same way as IT incidents — reducing analyst friction and required retraining.
• Leverage Sentinel’s analytics, hunting, and AI capabilities to surface OT threats that might otherwise be overlooked by traditional OT monitoring tools.

This is especially important where SOC responsibilities are shared across corporate IT security teams and plant-level OT engineers. Centralised visibility through Sentinel can reduce handoffs and improve mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), provided the integration is designed to avoid overwhelming analysts with noise.

The reality of SOC integration: people, process, and data challenges​

While the vendor integration simplifies technical data flows, operationalising unified IT/OT SOC work requires addressing several entrenched challenges:

• Skills shortage: OT engineers and SOC analysts speak different operational languages. Cross-training and dual-discipline playbooks are essential.
• Data quality and normalization: OT telemetry formats can be heterogeneous and require careful mapping to Sentinel’s tables and entity models to avoid loss of context.
• False positives and prioritisation: OT systems generate many benign anomalies; poor tuning can drown SOC analysts in low-value alerts.
• Governance and change management: Policies for who can act on OT incidents, when to escalate to plant operators, and how to perform remote response must be codified to ensure safety.

The integration is a technical enabler, not a turnkey operational transformation — organisations will need clear governance and staffing strategies to realise the promised benefits.

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Benefits: what organisations stand to gain​

• Improved cross-domain visibility — Security teams can see IT and OT telemetry in one place, enabling faster root-cause analysis.
• Reduced procurement friction — Marketplace availability simplifies acquisition and may enable customers to use existing Azure commercial arrangements.
• Faster time-to-value — Pre-built connectors, analytics, and entity mapping can speed onboarding and reduce custom engineering effort.
• Scalability and analytics — Azure-hosted SaaS enables centralised analytics across geographically distributed sites while benefitting from cloud scale and advanced AI-driven analytics.
• Alignment with cloud and AI strategies — For organisations already committed to Azure and Sentinel, this path reduces architectural friction for OT security modernisation.

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Risks and limitations: what the press release glosses over​

Connectivity and air-gap realities​

Many industrial control sites remain partially or wholly isolated for good operational reasons. SaaS options on Azure are less suitable for fully air-gapped or highly constrained environments unless robust edge collectors and local caching mechanisms are provided. Expect customers with extreme isolation or regulatory constraints to continue using on-premises or hybrid deployments.

Data sovereignty and compliance​

Operational data often contains sensitive information subject to export controls, regulatory constraints, or contractual obligations. Moving telemetry or asset inventories into a cloud service requires careful mapping of data flows to legal and compliance frameworks; not all jurisdictions permit the transfer of certain classes of industrial data without explicit controls.

Licensing and MACC caveats​

While Marketplace procurement and MACC alignment are attractive, they carry conditions. BYOL and free product listings are usually not MACC-eligible; only transactable Azure offers that are registered in the MACC program count toward consumption commitments. Additionally, MACC credits generally only apply when the purchased software is used exclusively in Azure, which can limit the benefit to hybrid or multi-cloud deployments.

Vendor lock-in and architectural coupling​

Deeper integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem can accelerate time-to-value but may also increase long-term coupling to Azure and Sentinel. Organisations with multicloud strategies or plans to retain diverse security tooling should weigh the benefits of native Microsoft integrations against the potential cost of reducing architectural flexibility.

Shared responsibility and supply chain risk​

Running OT security services in the cloud shifts some operational responsibilities to vendors and cloud providers. Customers must understand where their responsibilities stop and the provider’s responsibilities begin, particularly for incident response and forensic investigations involving OT systems. There is also the broader vendor-supply-chain risk: if a cloud-integrated security provider is compromised, the impact could cascade into industrial estates that rely on these services for detection and response.

False sense of security from "integration" claims​

Integration does not instantly deliver OT expertise inside an organisation. Dragos brings domain-specific detection and intelligence, but customers must still implement proper segmentation, governance, and response playbooks. Overreliance on a single integrated pipeline without operational validation can lead to blind spots.

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Technical specifics and verification​

Several of the key technical claims made in the collaboration announcement are verifiable against public vendor materials and platform documentation:

• Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM and security data lake capable of ingesting signals from many sources and enabling analytics, hunting, and automation. Sentinel supports partner connectors, content publishing, and a developer ecosystem for building and packaging detection and response content.
• Dragos has mature capabilities for OT asset discovery, protocol-level telemetry interpretation, and OT-focused threat intelligence; its platform has been positioned in analyst evaluations for cyber-physical protection.
• Microsoft Marketplace offers transactable pricing and procurement workflows that can count toward Azure consumption commitments, but MACC eligibility is subject to offer type (BYOL vs transactable, Azure-only license usage) and publisher registration.

Organisations evaluating this integration should validate three technical points during procurement and trial:

• The exact data flows — what telemetry is forwarded to Sentinel, what remains local, and how data is normalised.
• The entity and schema mapping — confirm that OT asset identifiers in Dragos map to Sentinel entities in a way that preserves operational context.
• Response automation boundaries — determine what automated actions are safe to execute from the cloud versus which actions must be manual or orchestrated locally.

If these checks are not validated during pilot testing, enterprises risk incomplete context inside the SIEM or inadvertently triggering unsafe automation in operational environments.

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Practical recommendations for enterprises and security teams​

• Start with a risk-driven pilot
• Select a small number of non-critical but representative sites to validate the edge-to-cloud data flow, alert noise level, and incident response choreography.
• Validate MACC and procurement terms
• Confirm whether the Dragos offer you plan to purchase is registered for Azure consumption commitments (MACC) and whether your intended deployment model (Azure-only vs hybrid) will be eligible for MACC credits.
• Define clear IT/OT governance and escalation paths
• Create joint playbooks that define when SOC analysts escalate to plant operators and who has authority to take control-plane actions.
• Protect safety and availability with staged automation
• Avoid fully automated blocking or remediation actions that could impact safety systems; prefer staged automated triage and analyst-confirmed response for OT.
• Keep sensitive data local when required
• Use edge analytics for raw process signals that must not leave site boundaries; forward enriched, de-identified, or metadata-level alerts to the cloud when compliance demands it.
• Invest in cross-discipline training
• Build hybrid teams or training programs so SOC analysts understand OT basics and OT engineers understand cybersecurity detection and investigation workflows.
• Test incident response end-to-end
• Simulate cross-domain incidents that originate in IT and affect OT (and vice versa) to validate detection, notification, and shutdown/containment procedures.
• Evaluate long-term vendor and cloud dependency
• Model migration and exit scenarios to avoid undesirable lock-in; ensure your data extraction and retention policies permit forensic analysis outside the cloud vendor ecosystem if needed.

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Vendor and ecosystem considerations​

Dragos’s move to deeply integrate with Microsoft brings both opportunity and competition into the OT security market. On one hand, enterprises benefit from established commercial channels, familiar tooling, and potentially faster time-to-value when they already use Azure and Sentinel at scale. On the other hand, the OT security market is crowded with vendors offering on-premises, hybrid, and cloud solutions; customers must evaluate vendor fit not just on integration breadth but on domain expertise, detection fidelity, and incident response maturity.
A few ecosystem dynamics to watch:

• Partnerships between OT specialists and cloud providers are accelerating; expect other OT security vendors to pursue similar integrations with leading cloud SIEMs and marketplaces.
• Cloud-native SIEM platforms are rapidly evolving their data lake and analytics capabilities, which benefits OT analytics but also raises expectations for long-term retention, query performance, and provenance of telemetry.
• Regulatory scrutiny of industrial cyber incidents will continue to grow, and cloud-hosted OT telemetry may be the subject of compliance controls in certain jurisdictions — vendors and customers must build compliance-by-design into deployment architectures.

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The bigger picture: digital transformation, AI, and cyber-physical risk​

The Dragos–Microsoft collaboration is part of a broader industry trend: the convergence of industrial operations, IT cloud platforms, and AI-driven analytics. Organisations are experimenting with AI for predictive maintenance, optimisation, and anomaly detection — and those same capabilities, if misconfigured, can introduce new classes of risk. The benefit of cloud-native analytics is scale and advanced modelling, but the cost of misapplied models in OT can be high. Successful adoption will be the result of disciplined engineering, conservative ramping of automation, and clear alignment between safety engineers and security teams.
As operational processes incorporate AI, the need for OT-aware threat models and curated threat intelligence becomes more pronounced. Attackers can leverage cloud exposure and AI-driven automation to accelerate harmful impacts; conversely, defenders can use the same technologies to reduce dwell time and contain incidents faster if the tooling preserves OT context and safety constraints.

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Conclusion​

Dragos’s deeper integration with Microsoft is a pragmatic step toward bridging the IT/OT security divide. By enabling the Dragos Platform to run on Azure, flow OT telemetry into Microsoft Sentinel, and be procured via Microsoft Marketplace — with a SaaS option arriving in Q1 2026 — the partnership offers a compelling path for organisations seeking unified visibility without ripping and replacing existing enterprise security investments.
That promise is real, but not automatic. The realisation of unified IT/OT security depends on sound deployment choices, rigorous pilot testing, careful attention to data sovereignty and MACC eligibility, and the hard work of integrating people and processes across IT and operational domains. Organisations that treat the integration as a step in a broader transformation — one driven by clear governance, staged automation, and cross-disciplinary training — will be best positioned to benefit from cloud-scale analytics while preserving the safety, availability, and resilience that operational technology demands.
For asset-intensive industries, the message is clear: cloud-native SIEMs and OT specialists are converging, and the pace of adoption will be determined as much by operational readiness and regulatory reality as by technical capability. The Dragos–Microsoft tie-up lowers several barriers to adoption, but it also raises new questions about procurement models, hybrid architectures, and the operational boundaries of cloud-managed OT security — questions that organisations must answer before confidently turning the key on unified IT/OT operations.

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Source: IT Brief Asia https://itbrief.asia/story/dragos-deepens-microsoft-tie-up-to-secure-ot-on-azure/

 

[ChatGPT]

Dragos’s expanded collaboration with Microsoft marks a decisive step in bringing purpose-built operational technology (OT) security into mainstream enterprise cloud and security operations: the Dragos Platform will run on Microsoft Azure, feed OT telemetry and asset context into Microsoft Sentinel, and be available for purchase through Microsoft Marketplace — with a Dragos-hosted SaaS option slated to begin in Q1 2026 — creating a direct path for asset-intensive organisations to unify IT and OT detection, investigation, and response workflows inside environments they already use.

Background​

Industrial control systems, distributed automation, and other OT environments were historically segregated from enterprise IT. That architectural separation is eroding as plants, utilities, and other operational sites become instrumented, connected, and dependent on cloud-based analytics and AI for operations, maintenance, and optimisation. The result: a rapidly expanding attack surface and shorter timelines from intrusion to operational impact, which pushes OT security into the same strategic conversation as IT security.
Dragos, long positioned as an OT-native cybersecurity vendor focused on asset-aware detection, threat intelligence and incident response, says the new integrations with Microsoft are intended to let organisations scale OT protections while keeping security workflows inside the Microsoft ecosystem they often already use. Microsoft frames the tie-up as a way for energy and industrial customers to “unify IT and OT security operations” while accelerating cloud and AI initiatives.
Industry research underscores why vendors and cloud providers are racing to solve this problem: MarketsandMarkets projects the global OT security market will grow from roughly USD 23.5 billion in 2025 to about USD 50.3 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 16.5%, reflecting strong investment pressure across energy, manufacturing, utilities and transport sectors. That market tailwind explains the strategic urgency behind deeper hyperscaler–OT vendor integrations.

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What Dragos and Microsoft are promising​

Four integration pillars​

Dragos’s announcement lays out four core pillars for the expanded collaboration: a SaaS deployment option on Azure (available Q1 2026), native integration into Microsoft Sentinel for OT telemetry and asset context, procurement through Microsoft Marketplace (with options to align purchases to Azure consumption commitments), and ongoing joint engineering and go-to-market work to deepen the technical fit. These are the building blocks Microsoft and Dragos say will let SOCs treat OT signals as first-class telemetry in enterprise detection stacks.

How the data flow is described​

At a technical level, Dragos describes a pattern where OT-specific telemetry, contextual asset inventories and OT threat intelligence are forwarded into Sentinel’s analytics pipeline. The intent is to create pre-built analytics, entity mappings and playbooks so Dragos notifications can become Sentinel incidents enriched with operational context — enabling cross-domain correlation, hunting and SOAR-driven response inside the Microsoft toolchain. Microsoft Sentinel’s Content Hub and custom connector framework are the natural mechanism for partner-supplied ingestion and packaged content.

Procurement and cloud economics​

Making Dragos available via Microsoft Marketplace is intended to reduce procurement friction for organisations that centralise commercial channels through Microsoft. Dragos also emphasises the option to apply Marketplace purchases to Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACC), allowing customers that already have or plan to take on Azure consumption deals to align OT security spend with broader cloud budgets. Documentation from Microsoft clarifies that MACC eligibility and mechanics are subject to offer type and billing relationships, which makes validation during procurement essential.

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Why this matters: operational and security outcomes​

Bringing OT context into a cloicrosoft Sentinel offers several immediate operational advantages — provided organisations implement the integration carefully.

• Cross-domain correlation: SOC teams can link identity, endpoint and lateral movement signals from IT with process anomalies and device-level events from OT, enabling faster root-cause analysis and reducing the time between detection and containment.
• Prioritisation by operational impact: Enriching alerts with precise asset context (for example, which PLC controls a critical turbine) helps analysts prioritise reccount for safety and availability.
• Streamlined incident management: Packaging Dragos detections as Sentinel incidents allows organisations to reuse existing SOC playbooks, case management and analyst tooling rather than building a parallel OT-only operations model.
• Scalable analytics and AI: A cloud-hosted SaaS model on Azure can centralise analytics across distributed sites, which benefits long-term hunting, model-building and large-scale threat intelligence correlation.

Those benefits are real, but they are operational outcomes rather than automatic features of integration; achieving them requires careful design of data flows, schema mapping and governance.

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Technical anatomy: connectors, content and control​

Sentinel connectors and Content Hub​

Microsoft Sentinel supports a broad partner ecosystem through the Content Hub and custom connector frameworks. solutions that include data connectors, analytic rules, workbooks and automation playbooks; customers install those solutions into their Sentinel workspace to ingest partner telemetry and depn logic. Dragos’s published partner brief and product pages confirm plans for a custom data connector and pre-built analytic templates that map Dragos notifications to Sentinel entities.

What needs to be clarified during trials​

Organisations should validate three technical points when evaluating the Dragos–Sentinel integration:

• The exact telemetry flow — what raw data is forwarded to Sentinel, what processing happens at the edge, and which fields are preserved for forensic analysis.
• The entity and schema mapping — that OT asset identifiers and relationships (e.g., PLC → line → plant) survive mapping into Sentinel’s entity model so operational impact is not lost.
• The response automation boundaries — which automated actions are safe to execute from a cloud orchestration layer versus which must remain local, operator-driven or human-in-the-loop for safety reasons.

Technical documentation from Microsoft shows the patterns and APIs through which partners can implement the above, but the specifics of Dragos’s implementation and its edge-to-cloud telemetry architecture are vendor-defined and should be validated in a proof-of-value (PoV). ([learn.microsoft.com](Resources for creating Microsoft Sentinel custom connectors options and real-world constraints
Dragos is explicit that its Azure SaaS offering will sit alongside existing on-premises and hybrid models to support the varied realities of industrial estates. That flexiecause many plants and remote facilities operate long-lived systems, enforce isolation for safety, or have regulatory or sovereignty constraints that preclude cloud forwarding of certain telemetry. The hybrid mrs and selective forwarding of enriched metadata to the cloud — is the pragmatic pattern for most early adopters.
But there are limits:

• Air-gapped and highly constrained sites will likely continue to require on-site collectors and local analysis; a SaaS model alone cannot replace that operational necessity.
• Latency and availability: deterministic requirements for certain process signals mean some telemetry cannot tolerate cloud transit delays; edge-first architectures and buffering are essential design elements.
• Data sovereignty and compliance: industrial telemetry may be subject to export controls or contractual limitations; cloud-forwarding needs to be mapped to legal frameworks and local region capabilities.

These constraints don’t invalidate the Azure SaaS model; they define the guardrails under which it will be useful.

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Commercial implications: Marketplace and Azure consumption commitments​

Making Dragos available via Microsoft Marketplace iwin for customers who standardise procurement through Microsoft’s channels. Marketplace listings can simplify contracting, procurement review and software lifecycle operations for technology portfolios already anchored in Azure. Dragos also points specifically to the option of aligning Marketplace purchases with Azure Consumption Commitments (MACC), which can let eligible customers apply OT security spend against existing cloud purchase commitments.
Two important procurement caveats:

• MACC eligibility is not universal. Only transactable Marketplace offers that meet specific eligibility criteria count toward MACC. BYOL, free tiers, or non-transactable listings typically do not apply. Organisations should confirm MACC registration for any specific Dragos offer before assuming consumption credits will apply.
• Hybrid and on-premise usage may not be MACC-eligible. MAy reward Azure usage; licences consumed outside Azure could be excluded from the commitment accounting. This nuance affects total cost-of-ownership calculations for hybrid estates and must be validated during procurement.

Procurement teams should request offer-specific MACC documentation as part of commercial diligence.

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Risk analysis: the strengths and the blind spots​

Tollaboration brings solid strengths — OT expertise, tight integration with a dominant enterprise cloud and SIEM, and procurement simplicity for Microsoft-centric organisations. Yet several risks and blind spots deserve attention.

• Operrom automation: Unbounded automation that executes control-plane actions can have catastrophic consequences in OT environments. The safe pattern is staged automation with human confirmation for any action that could affect safety systems.
• False sense of security: equal operational maturity. Organisations must still implement segmentation, independent testing, and cross-discipline playbooks; otherwise, they risk centralising noisy telemetry without improving detection fidelity.
• Vendor and cloud dependency: Deeper integration with a single cloud ecosystem accelerates time-to-value but increases long-term coupling; organisations with multi-cloud strategies should evaluate lock-in risk and exit options.
• Provenance and forensic completeness: Forensics in OT incidents require preserved raw telemetry and strong chain-of-custody practices; customers must confirm retention, export and legal access models for any cloud-hosted telein and systemic risk:** If a cloud-integrated OT security provider is compromised, the blast radius could include many critical sites that rely on that provider’s detections; customers should demand independent assurance and transparent incident playbooks.

These are not theoretical concerns; they reflect thes of cyber-physical systems and should be accounted for in PoVs and contracts.

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How to evaluate and pilot the integration: a practical checklist​

For security leaders and OT owners ready to evaluate the Dragos–Microsoft integration, a disciplined PoV and evaluation plan will be the difference between pilot sidence. Below is a recommended, sequenced checklist.

• Define success metrics up front.
• Example KPIs: reduction in mean time to detect (MTTD), percentage of prioritized incidents triaged with OT context, and time to incident containment for cross-domain incidents.
• Select a low-risk representative site.
• Use a plant or line that is operationally representative initial trials.
• Validate telemetry and schema.
• Confirm which fields, timestamps and identifiers are forwarded to Sentinel and that mapping preserves operational relanalytic fidelity.
• Run real-world scenarios and benign anomalies to evaluate false positive rates and tuning needs.
• Exercise playbooks end-to-end.
• Include SOC analysts, OT engineers and operations leadership in tabletop and live drills to stress test escalation and human-in-the-loop safeguards.
• Verify procurement and MACC eligibility.
• Obtain written confirmation that the chosen Dragos SKU is transactable in Marketplace and whether purchases count toward MACC for your billing account.
• Confirm data residency, retention and export policies.
• Ensure forensic exports and retention timelines meet legal and regulatory needs.
• Model exit and continuity scenarios.
• Validate you can export necessary artifacts and run core detection and triage outside the cloud vendor environment if needed.

A methodical PoV that covers these steps will give procurement, engineering and operations stakeholders confidence in production rollout decisions.

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Market context and competitive dynamics​

Dragos is not alone in partnering with hyperscalers and Set for OT security is crowded with vendors offering different mixes of edge collectors, asset discovery, anomaly detection and incident response. Dragos has previously integrated with other security ecosenced as a leader in industry evaluations, and its move to make SaaS on Azure and Sentinel integration official is part of a larger trend where OT specialists align with major cloud providers to reduce friction for enterprise buyers.
From a buyer’s perspective, there are positives to vendor integraering burden, familiar procurement flows, and potentially faster time-to-value. But convergence also raises questions about cross-vendor parity, consistent d the proliferation of multiple, sometimes overlapping cloud connectors that SOCs must manage. Expect competing OT vendors to accelerate their own hyperscaler and SIEM integrations in response.

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Recommendations for IT and OT leaders​

• Treat the Dragos–Microsoft integration as an enabler, not a turnkey solution. Plan for people and process changes, not just a technical installation.
• Prioritise a staged PoV that validates telemetry fidelity, response boundaries and MACC eligibility before a global rollout.
• Insist on documented, auditable data flows, retention and export capabilities for any cloud-hosted OT telemetry for forensic readiness and compliance.
• Build joint IT/OT runbooks and train SOC analysts and OT engineers together; cross-discipline capability is a gating factor to success.
• Prepare contractual clauses for SLAs, incident escalation ownership and disaster recovery that explicitly address OT safety and continuity requirements.

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Conclusion​

Dragos’s deeper tie-up with Microsoft is a pragmatic, technically credible answer to a pressing market need: organisations want to modernise operations with cloud and AI capabilities without accepting growing cyber-physical risk. By bringing Dragos’s OT-native detections, asset context and threat intelligence into Microsoft Sentinel — and making the platform available through Microsoft Marketplace and Azure-hosted SaaS — the collaboration removes many of the integration and procurement frictions that have slowed OT security modernisation to date.
That said, the promise is only as good as the operational execution. Successful adoption will depend on conservative automation design, hybrid edge-cloud architectures that respect air-gap realities, careful procurement diligence around MACC eligibility, and sustained investment in cross-disciplinary training and governance. Organisations that treat this as a project in people, process and data architecture — not just product deployment — will be best positioned to realise the integration’s benefits without taking on new operational risk.
For industrial and infrastructure operators, the headline is clear: unified IT/OT security inside familiar tools is now more attainable. The prudent path forward is measured adoption — run the pilot, validate the telemetry and mappings, lock down response boundaries, and bake safety into every automation before expanding coverage at scale.

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Source: IT Brief Australia https://itbrief.com.au/story/dragos-deepens-microsoft-tie-up-to-secure-ot-on-azure/

 

[ChatGPT]

Dragos’s expanded collaboration with Microsoft signals a step-change in how industrial organizations will attempt to bind operational technology (OT) security into mainstream cloud and security operations — delivering the Dragos Platform as a first-class presence on Microsoft Azure, feeding OT telemetry and intelligence into Microsoft Sentinel, and simplifying procurement through Microsoft Marketplace.

Background: why this matters now​

Operational technology environments — the industrial control systems that run power plants, water treatment, manufacturing lines, oil and gas infrastructure, transportation systems, and building automation — are moving from isolated, air-gapped models toward hybrid, connected architectures. That digitalization trend promises operational efficiency and AI-driven optimization, but it also increases the attack surface and blends IT and OT risk in ways most enterprises’ security programs were not designed to handle. Recent market research projects the global OT security market at roughly USD 23.5 billion in 2025 and rising to about USD 50.3 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the mid-teens — underscoring the rapid commercialization and urgency of OT-specific cybersecurity capabilities.
Dragos and Microsoft framed their announcement as a direct response to those converging forces: more connectivity, faster adversary timelines, and enterprise programs increasingly expected to govern OT the same way they govern IT. The partnership is positioned to give energy and industrial customers a single operational pathway for detection, investigation, and response across IT and OT while aligning OT security investment with cloud consumption models and enterprise procurement.

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What’s new: the four integration pillars​

Dragos structures the collaboration around four operational pillars designed to simplify adoption and maximize customer value. These are the concrete elements organizations need to evaluate when considering an IT/OT convergence strategy.

• Flexible deployment options: Starting in Q1 2026, the Dragos Platform will be available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment on Microsoft Azure in addition to existing on-premises and hybrid models. This provides customers choices for where sensitive OT telemetry and analysis are processed.
• Microsoft Sentinel integration: Dragos’s OT telemetry, asset context, and threat intelligence will feed directly into Microsoft Sentinel, enabling unified detection, investigation, and response across IT and OT. The integration aims to bring OT-aware alerts and entities into the familiar SIEM and SOC workflows used by IT security teams.
• Procurement through Microsoft Marketplace: Customers can procure Dragos via Microsoft Marketplace and leverage Azure consumption commitments (MACC), theoretically aligning OT security spend with broader cloud and AI initiatives and reducing procurement friction.
• Coordinated go-to-market and deeper technical integration: The announcement emphasizes a roadmap of deeper platform integration and joint execution with Microsoft’s vertical teams for energy & resources and asset-intensive industries. That alignment aims to square product-level integration with sales and delivery channels for global scale.

Each of these pillars reduces distinct friction points: architecture, operations, procurement, and go-to-market. But each also introduces new operational and governance questions that organizations must evaluate before entrusting OT telemetry and response to a cloud-first workflow.

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Technical implications: what the integration enables — and requires​

Unified telemetry and SOC workflows​

Feeding OT telemetry into Microsoft Sentinel promises a number of practical outcomes for enterprise security teams:

• Single pane of glass for alerts: SOC analysts can view OT-specific indicators and Dragos-derived contexts alongside IT alerts inside Sentinel, reducing tool switching and information silos.
• Asset-aware correlation: Dragos adds OT asset context — manufacturer-specific device models, control logic characteristics, and industrial protocol behavior — that helps reduce false positives when correlated with IT alerts. That improves prioritization in mixed IT/OT incidents.
• Playbooks and automation potential: Sentinel’s automation and playbook features can, in theory, be extended to OT scenarios when presented with Dragos’ threat analytics, enabling semi-automated enrichment and response workflows. However, the operational risk of automating actions in OT must be handled conservatively.

Deployment flexibility and data flows​

The option to run Dragos as SaaS on Azure changes the calculus for many organizations:

• It allows companies to centralize analytics in the cloud and scale processing of OT telemetry without large on-prem ingestion infrastructure.
• It raises questions about telemetry routing, latency, and local control: critical OT use cases often require deterministic response or visibility at the edge; not all telemetry can be or should be moved to cloud processing. Dragos still supports on-prem and hybrid models, but customers must architect edge collectors and gateway behavior carefully.
• Data sovereignty and regulatory compliance will influence where telemetry is processed — especially in sectors like energy, utilities, and defense where local regulations or national security requirements may restrict cloud processing or data export.

Integration surfaces and security of the pipeline​

Connecting OT monitoring systems with a cloud-native SIEM introduces a pipeline that must be secured end-to-end:

• Encryption, mutual authentication, and least-privilege network design are table stakes.
• Organizations must validate how Dragos encrypts telemetry in transit and at rest, what telemetry is uploaded to Azure for SaaS use, and how long sensitive data is retained.
• The integration with Sentinel will require careful mapping of identity, entity resolution, and multi-team roles to prevent IT-only responders from taking unsafe OT actions.

These integration and governance considerations are not unique to Dragos + Microsoft, but the partnership amplifies them because of the scale of Microsoft’s cloud footprint and Sentinel’s central role in many enterprises’ security operations.

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Strategic strengths of the Dragos–Microsoft approach​

• Operational alignment at scale. Large enterprises already using Azure and Sentinel gain a vendor-native path to bring OT signals into existing security workflows. That reduces friction for SOCs and can accelerate enterprise-level coverage for OT assets.
• Vendor recognition and market momentum. Dragos is widely recognized as a leader in OT cybersecurity; it was named a Leader in Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) Protection Platforms, and its product positioning is backed by a mature threat intelligence capability and practitioner services — assets that matter in incident response and remediation.
• Cloud scale and platform economics. Availability on Microsoft Marketplace and the ability to apply Azure consumption commitments (MACC) can make OT security budgets easier to align with cloud and AI spending, simplifying procurement and potentially enabling faster adoption.
• Joint go-to-market for asset-intensive sectors. Microsoft’s vertical teams for energy & resources and Dragos’s domain expertise deliver a combined sales and delivery capability that can help with regulatory and compliance conversations in critical sectors.
• Familiar SIEM tooling for IT teams. Many SOCs already use Sentinel; integrating Dragos into that environment reduces the organizational resistance that comes from introducing a wholly separate OT security toolchain.

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Legitimate risks and open questions​

While the integration offers material benefits, several significant risks and caveats must be considered by industrial and security leaders.

• Cloud vs. edge trade-offs. Some OT telemetry needs to be processed locally to satisfy latency, safety, or reliability constraints. SaaS convenience must not override requirements for local control, failover, and on-site isolation. Customers should insist on clear architectural options for pure on-prem or hybrid edge processing when required.
• Data residency and regulatory limits. National security, critical infrastructure rules, and sector-specific compliance may restrict sending certain telemetry or forensic artifacts to a public cloud. Organizations in regulated industries must validate that Azure regions, contractual protections, and data handling practices meet their legal obligations.
• Operational risk of automation. Integrating OT alerts into Sentinel automation workflows risks enabling responses that could impact physical processes. Any automated remediation must be quantifiably safe for controllers, actuators, and human operators. Conservative playbook design is essential.
• Vendor and platform lock-in. Procurement through Microsoft Marketplace and alignment with MACC can accelerate adoption but also deepens a vendor footprint. Customers should evaluate multi-vendor strategies and portability to avoid future lock-in or single-point-of-failure dependencies.
• Skill and process gaps. Unified telemetry does not equal unified understanding. IT SOC analysts typically lack OT domain expertise. The success of any IT/OT integration depends on cross-training, new playbooks, and coordinated incident response between OT engineers and IT security teams. Dragos’s practitioner services are positioned to fill that gap, but customer-side governance must prioritize multidisciplinary drills and change-management.
• Supply chain and third-party risk. As OT monitoring becomes more dependent on cloud connectors and third-party integrations, the implications of supply-chain compromises grow. Security teams must demand transparency about third-party libraries, CI/CD controls, and the security posture of the integrated pipeline.

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Vendor and market context: how this fits into broader OT security trends​

The Dragos–Microsoft integration arrives amid a broader industry shift: analyst firms and market research indicate the OT security market is growing fast as organizations prioritize ICS/OT protection. Analysts have emphasized that OT requires specialized technology — deep industrial protocol visibility, asset-aware threat detection, and intelligence informed by real-world adversary activity — capabilities Dragos has built its reputation on. At the same time, major cloud and SIEM vendors are pushing to be the control plane for enterprise security operations, and Microsoft’s Sentinel is a central node in that strategy for many organizations. The partnership therefore reflects a natural convergence: OT-specialist telemetry and intelligence feeding into mainstream cloud security operations via a trusted cloud provider.
Other OT security vendors have pursued similar integrations with cloud SIEMs and EDR/SOC platforms; what distinguishes this announcement is the combination of (a) a vendor-recognized OT platform (Dragos) being available as a SaaS on Azure, (b) a native ingestion and content mapping into Sentinel, and (c) the procurement and billing alignment through Microsoft Marketplace. Together these elements address many of the non-technical blockers — procurement processes, commercial alignment, and organizational workflows — that historically slowed IT/OT convergence.

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Practical guidance: what customers should ask and test before adopting​

If you are evaluating the Dragos + Microsoft integration, use this checklist as a starting point for procurement, architecture reviews, and pilot validation.

• Governance and compliance
• Which Azure regions will host my OT telemetry, and can I restrict data residency where required?
• What contractual and technical guarantees exist for data access, retention, and deletion?
• Does SaaS deployment meet sector-specific regulatory requirements (e.g., critical infrastructure rules, defense standards)?
• Architecture and operations
• Which telemetry types are sent to Azure, and which can remain local at the edge?
• What are the supported architectures for high-availability and failover in the event of cloud connectivity loss?
• Can Sentinel incidents be enriched with full OT context (asset models, process impact, playbooks)?
• Security and pipeline integrity
• What encryption, authentication, and integrity protections are applied to telemetry in transit and at rest?
• Has the pipeline been threat-modeled for supply chain attack vectors?
• What logging and forensic retention options exist for incident response?
• Response and automation
• Which Sentinel playbooks and automated actions are safe for OT environments, and which must be manual?
• What role separation and change-control processes are enforced to prevent unsafe cross-team actions?
• Commercials and procurement
• How will Azure consumption commitments (MACC) apply across subscription tiers?
• Are there negotiated SLAs for Dragos SaaS on Azure, and how do those integrate with Microsoft’s cloud SLAs?
• What is the exit strategy and data export process if you choose to move off the integrated model?
• People and process
• What training and joint runbook support will Dragos and Microsoft provide?
• How will cross-domain incident drills be structured, and who owns escalation decisions during an OT incident?

Run targeted pilots that test the end-to-end pipeline — from asset discovery and baseline profiling to alert generation, Sentinel incident creation, and triage escalation — before broad rollout. Use representative OT assets, simulate plausible fault conditions, and validate that analysts can safely and consistently interpret OT alerts in concert with OT engineers.

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Suggested phased deployment plan (example)​

• Pilot phase (4–8 weeks)
• Identify representative OT segment and deploy lightweight collectors.
• Ingest OT telemetry into on-prem Dragos and into Sentinel with limited retention.
• Validate entity mapping, alert fidelity, and SOC analyst workflows.
• Validation phase (8–12 weeks)
• Extend pilot to additional sites; test SaaS ingestion in an Azure region that meets compliance needs.
• Run cross-team incident response drills; validate roles, playbooks, and safe automated actions.
• Test failover and offline-edge scenarios.
• Incremental rollout (3–9 months)
• Expand to critical sites with prioritized assets.
• Train SOC, NOC, and OT engineers on integrated playbooks.
• Integrate procurement and billing into cloud consumption processes where applicable.
• Continuous improvement (ongoing)
• Maintain joint review cadence with vendor teams.
• Update playbooks after real incidents and tabletop exercises.
• Reassess data retention, regional architectures, and automation policies annually or after major change events.

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Cost, ROI, and procurement considerations​

Making OT security part of cloud consumption models can unlock financial and operational incentives: simplified procurement, cloud consumption alignment, and potential discounts through enterprise MACC arrangements. But customers must consider total cost of ownership beyond subscription fees:

• Edge hardware, collectors, and network upgrades to support telemetry flow.
• Integration and professional services for safe deployment and playbook creation.
• Ongoing training and cross-domain staffing to operate a unified IT/OT SOC.
• Potential incremental cloud consumption for telemetry ingestion, storage, and analytics.

ROI arguments are strongest when tied to measurable outcomes: reduced mean time to detect (MTTD) for OT threats, faster incident containment that reduces downtime, and demonstrable regulatory compliance improvements. Build financial models that include avoided outage costs and compare them to the full operational bill of material, not just the SaaS license price. Markets indicate strong market growth and vendor investment in this space — but growth does not obviate the need for careful commercial and operational diligence.

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Final assessment: balanced verdict​

The Dragos–Microsoft expansion is a pragmatic and consequential move for industrial cybersecurity. It addresses a long-standing enterprise friction point — bringing OT signals into mainstream cloud-native SOC tooling — while offering practical mechanisms for procurement and scale. For organizations already standardized on Azure and Sentinel, the integration will materially reduce the barriers to a unified IT/OT security posture and accelerate the maturation of OT defenses.
That said, the real-world value depends on disciplined architecture, conservative automation, and strong governance. SaaS convenience cannot be allowed to override the safety, availability, and regulatory constraints that are intrinsic to OT environments. Customers must insist on transparent data handling, robust edge options, clear SLAs, and tight human-in-the-loop controls for any automated responses.
If implemented thoughtfully, the partnership gives industrial organizations a viable, future-ready path to modernize securely — combining Dragos’s OT-native threat intelligence and detection with Microsoft’s scale, SIEM capabilities, and procurement ecosystem. But the integration will be judged on the hard metrics that matter to industrial operators: fewer unplanned shutdowns, faster threat containment with minimal operational disruption, and demonstrable compliance in constrained regulatory contexts. Those outcomes are achievable — provided the technical, procedural, and contractual details are addressed up front and tested under realistic operational conditions.

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What to watch next​

• Real-world pilot reports and case studies that validate the promise of unified IT/OT detection and response.
• Technical content from Dragos and Microsoft detailing supported Azure regions, data residency options, and the exact telemetry schema delivered into Sentinel.
• Pricing and MACC specifics for Marketplace procurement, including exit clauses and data-export guarantees.
• Governance frameworks and joint offerings for regulated critical infrastructure sectors that require stricter on-prem or sovereign controls.

The Dragos–Microsoft collaboration sets an important direction: OT security is moving from bespoke, siloed tooling to integrated, cloud-friendly platforms. The work now shifts to operational teams and procurement functions to ensure that the bridge between IT and OT is safe, auditable, and resilient — because when the physical world depends on digital protections, the stakes are enormous.

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Source: Industrial Cyber Dragos expands Microsoft partnership to integrate OT security with Azure and Sentinel - Industrial Cyber