It’s been an eventful past 48 hours for Microsoft. Yesterday, the software giant announced the acquisition of mobile development giant Xamarin Inc. in a deal reportedly worth north of $400 million. And today it’s rolling out one of the biggest updates to Azure in recent memory. Much of the new functionality that is being introduced for the cloud platform is designed to help organizations protect their off-premise workloads from attack more effectively.

The most significant addition is a service called Active Directory Identity Protection that promises to automate the detection of malicious access requests. Before authorizing a login attempt, its security algorithms closely examine everything from the location of a user to the number of times they entered incorrect credentials before hitting the right combination. The information is then distilled into a risk score that the administrators in charge of the deployment can use to curtail suspicious activity

The service may be configured to request additional verification from a worker who failed to input the correct password the first time around, or outright block requests that exceed a certain risk threshold. In the background, Microsoft records every login attempt and feeds the key details back into its algorithms to improve their accuracy. The company’s vast trove of threat data is also a key component of the other breach prevention functionality that it’s launching as part of today’s update.

The Azure Security Center can now be used to analyze crash reports from the virtual machines in an organization’s cloud environment for signs of foul play. According to Microsoft, its engineers originally developed the capability to provide better malware protection for Windows PCs, which have a similar tendency to freeze or shut down during ill-devised exploitation attempts. The functionality aims to complement the behavioral analytics technology that the company has already been using to scan for threats in its cloud platform.

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