Get visibility into your DeepSeek use with Defender for Cloud Apps

Microsoft

Jan 31, 2025

The world has never seen technology adopted at the pace of AI. While AI increases productivity and is deeply integrated into business processes, it can also come with risks in terms of security, privacy and compliance.

On January 20, DeepSeek caused a big splash after announcing DeepSeek R1, a powerful and inexpensive AI reasoning model that can answer questions, solve logic problems and write its own computer programs.

DeepSeek has seen unprecedented adoption with millions of app downloads in just a few days! Chances are that many users within your organization may already be leveraging it. However, safe adoption within your business requires a careful assessment of the risks that an AI app may bring to your organization—and that’s where Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps comes in.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps you discover and protect more than 800 generative AI applications, now including DeepSeek. It provides the necessary overview of an app's usage in your organization, combined with the potential risk that the app poses for your organization. In fact, it profiles more than 90 separate risk attributes for each application in the Cloud App Catalog so you can make informed choices in a unified experience.

From the Cloud Discovery dashboard navigate to the Generative AI section to see high-level usage statistics of DeepSeek. Here you can review, understand the top entities using the app, identify usage trends and review the potential risk it poses for your organization. You can also do a deep dive to identify usage spikes, data uploads, transactions, total traffic and so on.

After analyzing the risk and 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:

Tagging the app with built-in tags to enforce further access control on the network layer (endpoints or integrated 3rd party network appliances). For more information, see Govern discovered apps.
On-boarding the app to Microsoft Entra ID to manage logins and govern users when applicable. For more information, see Add an application to your tenant.
Using Conditional Access app controls to monitor and control user sessions, prevent risky actions, and avert potential data exfiltration. For more information, see Protect apps with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Conditional Access app control.

Want to learn more about how Defender for Cloud Apps can help you manage AI adoption securely? Dive into our resources for a deeper conversation. Get started now.

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