[German]Microsoft is currently intensively courting the European market in order to retain customers in the government sector. To this end, Redmond has announced a European Security Program. This new initiative is designed to strengthen cyber security across Europe and is available to all European governments free of charge.
Microsoft Microsoft vice president Brad Smith presented the initiative on June 4, 2025 in the article Microsoft launches new European Security Program (see the following tweet).
According to Microsoft, the European cyber threat landscape is evolving with the advancement of AI and digital technologies, presenting organizations with new challenges. There is no denying that this is not just true for the European cyber threat landscape.
This requires stronger partnerships and improved solutions between vendors and customers, argues Smith. Ransomware groups and state-sponsored actors from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are becoming more extensive and sophisticated, according to Microsoft. The conclusion: European cyber protection cannot afford to stand still. You can agree kind of with that.
For this reason, Microsoft has now announced a new initiative called the European Security Program. Redmond wants to expand its activities to defend cyber security in Europe. This goes hand in hand with the five European Digital Commitments Microsoft presented in Brussels five weeks ago. The program is free of charge, but is only aimed at European governments. The European security program comes with three new elements:
- Increased sharing of AI-based threat intelligence with European governments;
- additional investment to strengthen cybersecurity capabilities and resilience;
- and expanding our partnerships to disrupt cyberattacks and dismantle the networks used by cybercriminals.
In the linked blog post, Smith makes concrete and sensible suggestions on how to proceed. In particular, the knowledge gained via AI about the tactics, techniques and procedures used by advanced persistent threat actors should be shared with European governments. In doing so, Microsoft aims to help European governments strengthen their cyber resilience and enable proactive defense.
Microsoft is making this program available to European governments free of charge. This means governments of all 27 member states of the European Union (EU) as well as the EU accession countries, the members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the United Kingdom, Monaco and the Vatican.
It's good that Microsoft is offering something for free. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this is intended to hammer in the "European governments want to get away from the Microsoft monopoly" in order to cement further dependencies. But maybe I'm seeing it wrong
