Working with the app page

Cloud applications have become pivotal entities inside organizations, increasing productivity and enabling remote work. As adoption of these applications rises, Security and Compliance admins must deal with the risks that usage of cloud applications might expose the organization to.

Shadow IT, whether across pure web apps, or daily added OAuth apps, is a significant concern and requires a dedicated experience to handle such types of entities in the organization.

An admin should be able to get all risk and usage-related information about applications in use to make the best decision for the organization.

The app experience in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides the necessary high-level overview of an app's usage in the organization, combined with the risk that the app potentially exposes the organization to. Allowing a single experience to review all apps' shadow usage and risk enable the admin to make rapid, in-context decisions about the app's usage in the organization.

The experience covers both Discovered apps as part of the pure Shadow IT discovery capabilities of Defender for Cloud Apps and any discovered OAuth apps as part of its OAuth app discovery for Microsoft 365 apps.

Discovered cloud apps

Here you can review an app's high-level usage stats, understand top entities using the app in your organization, identify usage trends and review the potential risk the poses for your organization.

Overview tab on Apps page.

Continue investigating the app's risk by getting familiar with more than 90 risk indicators that affect the app's risk in the Info tab.

Info tab on Apps page.

Take a deep dive into the app's usage trends to identify usage spikes, top entities across various dimensions like data uploads, transactions, total traffic and so on.

Continue investigating by viewing the top 100 users, source IPs, and devices (when Defender for Endpoint integration is enabled) to be able to continue the investigation in an additional entity context.

Cloud Apps Usage tab on Apps page.

Investigate users in Cloud Apps Usage tab on Apps page.

Investigate devices in Cloud Apps Usage tab on Apps page.

After analyzing the risk versus the usage of the application, an admin can decide which app controls should be applied to this application using the app actions. Admins can control cloud applications by:

Discovered OAuth apps

Discover and review an OAuth app's privilege levels, amount and types of permissions granted, consented users across the organization, and trends of the app's consents and audited activities across organizational assets.

OAuth app details on Apps page.

Drill down to get more metadata about the OAuth app, pivot to investigate app activities and app consents, and decide whether this app should continue to have access to organizational assets or should be banned by using the app actions.

OAuth app info and usage on Apps page.

Client app context (preview)

Note

This is a preview capability and does not guarantee full mapping across Cloud and Client apps. If a known client app was not mapped to discovered cloud apps, contact support. Client app context is available only for discovered cloud apps. To view the full list of discovered client apps in the organization, visit Threat vulnerability management in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.

For customers using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's Threat vulnerability management solution, a client app context will be available as part of the experience to better understand the full usage context of the app in the organization. For example, if the WhatsApp web app was discovered and WhatsApp clients are being installed across the organization, the information about the WhatsApp client installation and version weaknesses will appear in the cloud app's overview tab.

Next steps