What is the primary purpose of Azure Security Center?

The primary purpose of Azure Security Center is to provide unified security management and advanced threat protection. This service plays a crucial role in enhancing the security posture of Azure resources by offering a comprehensive view of the security state across all Azure subscriptions. It helps identify vulnerabilities, assesses security configurations, and provides recommendations for improving security.

Azure Security Center not only facilitates threat detection but also enables organizations to proactively defend their workloads from potential security breaches. It utilizes advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to detect anomalies and potential threats in real-time. Furthermore, it offers features like security policy management, compliance assessment, and integration with threat intelligence, all of which are designed to create a more secure cloud environment.

The other options focus on different aspects of Azure's functionality. While optimizing resource usage and managing server scaling are important, they fall under broader resource management and not specifically tied to security management. Monitoring application performance relates more to the operational aspects of applications, which is outside the scope of security management provided by Azure Security Center.