Azure Security Monitoring and Management
Utilizing Microsoft Azure for their vital applications and data has numerous advantages for firms moving to the Cloud for the first time. The appeal of the Cloud is mostly driven by its flexibility, scalability, and simplicity of use.
Cloud apps and services provide more freedom, but IT security suffers greatly. They are still in charge of Azure compliance and security in the interim. How you expand your reach from on-premises security monitoring to Azure security monitoring without using different tools and monitoring techniques is the question facing every IT security expert.
Microsoft Azure employs a wide range of operational, physical, and infrastructural security protections, but there are some steps you must take to protect your workload. You can improve your cloud security posture with Azure security monitoring.
Azure Security Monitoring Tools
Microsoft’s Azure Security Monitoring tools are powerful and easy to use. They provide real-time insight into the security of your Azure virtual machines and apps, allowing you to monitor and control them as needed.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a security service that protects your data in Azure. It detects threats as they’re entering your network and stops them before they reach your application or virtual machine. You get protection from advanced threat protection, identity protection, DDoS protection, and more.
Azure DDoS Protection
Azure DDoS Protection helps protect your Azure services from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by detecting and blocking malicious traffic before it reaches your application. It also stops future attacks at their source with deep packet inspection (DPI) technology designed to detect and prevent all types of DDoS attacks with 99.99% accuracy.
Microsoft Purview Information Protection
Microsoft Purview Information Protection helps you protect sensitive information by encrypting it before it is sent to recipients. The solution also provides visibility into how much data has been encrypted and decrypted, so you can ensure everything was done correctly.
PSRule for Azure
PSRule is a rule engine that can automatically create policies based on Azure resources such as virtual machines, storage accounts, and networks. With PSRule, you can create rules that govern how different resources interact in your environment, including VM snapshots, software updates for a given instance, or a VM resource type like a storage account.
Azure Rights Management (RMS)
The cloud-based security solution employed by Azure Information Protection is called Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS).
Azure RMS uses encryption, identity, and permission controls to safeguard files and emails across various devices, including phones, tablets, and PCs.
For instance, Azure RMS’s permanent protection helps secure the data when employees email a document to a partner organization or store a document in their cloud storage.
Azure Security Features and Services
The Azure Security features and services are essential for businesses that want to protect their data and applications. Azure offers a range of customer security options and cloud-native security capabilities that enable you to manage your infrastructure.
Azure Role-Based Access Control
Azure role-based access control enables organizations to grant access to specific resources by defining the roles, policies, and scopes. Organizations can create a classification hierarchy that describes the different access levels within their organization. This enables them to manage the access rights of users and groups across Azure resources.
Antimalware
Azure Antimalware provides real-time scanning of files as they are moved between on-premises and cloud environments. Azure Antimalware scans files before they are sent to your on-premises data center or public cloud service provider for processing. You can also create custom rules that allow you to block files that meet specific criteria, such as malware signatures or file types, without knowing what file type or virus pattern you’re looking for.
ExpressRoute
ExpressRoute allows you to offload traffic from your network, so it doesn’t have to travel across the public Internet. For example, suppose you’re hosting websites on Azure and want to give your visitors a faster experience without having their web requests go through a corporate firewall. In that case, ExpressRoute will route the request through your Azure datacenter instead of using the public Internet.
Azure Multi-Factor Authentication
Multi-factor Authentication is a strategy that adds a factor to your login process. Multi-Factor Authentication satisfies users’ need for a quick sign-in procedure while helping secure access to data and apps. Several verification methods (phone calls, text messages, mobile app notifications, or verification codes) and third-party OATH tokens deliver strong Authentication.
Azure Identity Protection
Azure Identity Protection provides identity protection from the Cloud to help protect your users’ accounts. It helps protect your users against account compromise by delivering them with two-step verification for all their cloud services.
Identity Protection assists real-time risk mitigation by offering notifications and suggested corrective action. It determines the level of user danger. Risk-based controls can be set up to help protect application access from emerging risks automatically.
Defender for Cloud
Defender for Cloud is an identity protection service that helps prevent phishing attacks on Azure AD endpoints. Defender checks inbound emails against known malicious files and URLs while scanning outgoing emails for viruses or spam.
Intelligent Security Graph
The Intelligent Security Graph is a new, open-source analytics platform that uses machine learning to detect anomalies in the network. You can use it to detect unauthorized access to your VMs or containers, abnormal behavior of your applications, or unusual usage patterns. The service is managed in Azure Government and Azure Government Premier subscription plans.
Virtual Network Gateways
Azure Virtual Network Gateway allows you to extend your on-premises network into Azure virtual networks. With Virtual Network Gateway, you can connect multiple on-premises locations to a single Virtual Network so that they can communicate with each other securely through the Cloud. This means that all hosts within your virtual network can communicate with each other without any additional configuration required by you.
Wrapping Up
With the right information and resources, companies can better navigate the challenges of securing their data in the Cloud. While nobody can provide a silver bullet to solve all security risks, Microsoft is committed to helping customers connect to Azure and building a broader awareness of threats. There are many challenges to securing your data in the Cloud, and educating yourself is just the first step toward overcoming them. We hope you’ll find this post helpful in that endeavor.
Awsom LLC is always here for the best advice and a team of experts for any cloud consultation. By partnering with them, you can maximize the benefits of your cloud platform. In addition to developing cloud-based applications, they also provide support for implementing them.