Copilot has proven to be a helpful AI chatbot because of its advanced natural language processing capabilities, footnotes, and more. Microsoft brought those signature Copilot capabilities over to the security space with its Microsoft Copilot for Security offering, which is now almost ready for prime time.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that Copilot for Security is moving from early access to general availability on April 1, making it possible for all security teams to take advantage of the tool on a pay-as-you-go basis. 

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Copilot for Security uses AI to assist professionals with their daily workflows. For example, Copilot can create incident summarizations with actionable summaries, assess the impact of security incidents, reverse engineer scripts, provide actional step-by-step guidance for incident response, and more.

"I am thrilled to announce the general availability of Microsoft Copilot for Security. We believe it will be a force multiplier in security, helping to tilt the scale for defenders," Microsoft VP of Security Vasu Jakkal said.

Research conducted by Microsoft's Office of the Chief Economist found that 97% of experienced security analysts using Copilot for Security wanted to use it again and, while using Copilot, professionals were 22% faster at common security tasks and 7% more accurate.

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Copilot for Security can be accessed as a standalone portal or an embedded experience within one of Microsoft's existing security products, such as Microsoft Entra.  

In addition to expanding the availability of Copilot for Security, Microsoft unveiled some new capabilities, including custom promptbooks, knowledgebase integrations, a multilingual interface in 25 languages, the ability to process and respond to prompts in eight languages, usage reporting, Microsoft Entra audit logs and diagnostic logs, and the ability to connect your curated external attack surface from Defender EASM, according to the press release.

I've seen a demo of custom promptbooks, which allow users to create and save a series of natural language prompts for common security tasks. The feature seems valuable for security teams because they can complete repetitive workstreams by applying a series of prompts to a task with a single click.

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Since Copilot for Security will be offered on a pay-as-you-go model, organizations can start small and increase their usage as they see fit. Microsoft anticipates the tool's cost will be billed monthly via a new Security Compute Unit at$4 per hour. 

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