Modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs) face a persistent challenge: managing threats across multiple security tools while maintaining operational efficiency. While single-vendor approaches offer simplicity, they often leave gaps that sophisticated attackers are quick to exploit. The reality is that today's threat landscape demands a more nuanced approach—one that combines the best capabilities from multiple specialized vendors.
KnowBe4 Defend now integrates with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, creating a unified protection and threat management experience that SOC teams have been asking for.
The Technical Foundation: API-Driven Integration
At its core, this integration leverages Microsoft's API capabilities to create seamless connectivity between KnowBe4 Defend and Microsoft Defender for Office 365. When KnowBe4 Defend's advanced threat detection engine identifies a dangerous email—whether through our agentic AI capabilities, behavioral analytics, or human risk insights—the system automatically interfaces with Microsoft's Unified quarantine functionality.
This isn't just about moving emails from one place to another. The integration maintains full context and metadata throughout the process. When Defend flags a message as potentially malicious, it immediately provides Microsoft with detailed verdict information and threat intelligence context. With established policies in place, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 moves the message from the user’s inbox into quarantine.
Unified Quarantine: Streamlined Threat Management
What makes this particularly powerful for SOC teams is Microsoft's Unified quarantine approach. The functionality consolidates quarantined emails from both Microsoft Defender and KnowBe4 Defend into a single, familiar management console.
From a technical perspective, this means your SOC analysts can search, preview, release and remediate emails from multiple detection sources without switching between platforms. They can apply consistent policies and retention rules across all quarantined messages, regardless of which system initially detected the threat. This unified approach dramatically reduces the cognitive load on security teams who previously had to navigate between different interfaces with varying workflows.
And it’s an industry‑first: Microsoft Defender and KnowBe4 Defend come together to protect the inbox through one quarantine and one action surface—while keeping vendor attribution crystal‑clear across every experience, so analysts always know who caught what, and why.
Deep Integration with Microsoft's Security Ecosystem
The integration extends far beyond basic quarantine functionality. KnowBe4 Defend's verdicts and metadata are fully integrated into the Microsoft Defender portal reporting, including Threat Explorer, Email Entity Page and email event queries in the Advanced Hunting schema. This visibility helps SOC teams trace detection sources, investigate faster and coordinate responses.
Operational Benefits for SOC Teams
From an operational standpoint, this integration addresses several pain points that SOC teams regularly encounter.
- First, it eliminates the context switching that typically slows down incident response. When an analyst investigates a dangerous email, they no longer need to toggle between the Microsoft security console and a separate KnowBe4 interface to gather complete information.
- Second, the integration maintains audit trails across both platforms. This is crucial for compliance requirements and post-incident analysis. Security teams can demonstrate their multi-layered protection approach while maintaining consistent documentation standards.
The streamlined workflow helps accelerate threat response times. When KnowBe4 Defend identifies a threat, the automatic quarantine action contains it immediately, while SOC teams receive alerts through their existing Microsoft notification systems. This means faster remediation without switching between platforms.
Defense in Depth Without Operational Overhead
Perhaps most importantly, this integration delivers true defense-in-depth capabilities without adding operational complexity. KnowBe4 Defend's specialized human risk intelligence and advanced behavioral analytics complement Microsoft's established AI-driven threat detection. When combined, they provide a cohesive defense fabric that's particularly effective against sophisticated social engineering attacks that might bypass traditional technical controls.
Getting Started Today
This integration is available now for organizations ready to strengthen their email security posture while simplifying SOC operations. By leveraging Microsoft's established infrastructure while adding specialized threat intelligence, SOC teams get the best of both worlds: comprehensive protection and operational simplicity.
For organizations already invested in Microsoft's security ecosystem, this integration maximizes that investment while adding critical human risk context that's often missing from purely technical approaches. The result is a more resilient security posture that's actually easier to manage—exactly what today's stretched SOC teams need.
With KnowBe4 Defend you can:
