Azure Security Center, now unified under Microsoft Defender for Cloud, protects cloud workloads by providing a centralized platform for unified security management and advanced threat protection across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It operates by continuously assessing resources against a vast set of built-in security benchmarks and compliance standards, identifying misconfigurations, and providing actionable hardening recommendations to proactively reduce the attack surface. Its integrated threat detection leverages behavioral analytics and machine learning to identify real-time, active threats such as malicious network traffic, compromised identities, and cryptomining attacks, triggering immediate alerts with prioritized remediation steps. By unifying security policy management, vulnerability assessment, and just-in-time access controls for VMs into a single dashboard, it empowers organizations to shift from a reactive to a proactive security posture, ensuring robust protection for data and applications running in Azure and beyond.