Industry standards, regulatory standards, and benchmarks are represented in Microsoft Defender for Cloud as security standards. These standards are assigned to scopes such as Azure subscriptions, AWS accounts, and GCP projects.

Defender for Cloud continuously evaluates your hybrid cloud environment against these standards and provides insights on compliance in the regulatory compliance dashboard.

When you onboard subscriptions and accounts to Defender for Cloud, the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB) automatically begins evaluating the resources within the scope.

This benchmark is based on the cloud security principles defined by the Microsoft Security Benchmark and applies these principles with detailed technical recommendations for Azure, for other cloud providers (such as AWS and GCP), as well as for other Microsoft clouds.

The compliance dashboard gives you an overview of your overall compliance posture.
Security for non‑Azure platforms follows the same cloud‑agnostic security principles as those of Azure.
Each benchmark control provides the same level of granularity and the same scope of technical guidance for both Azure and other cloud resources.

From the compliance dashboard, you can manage all your compliance requirements for your cloud deployments, including automatic, manual, and shared responsibilities.

Next unit: Improve your regulatory compliance in Defender for Cloud