Azure Security Practices To Follow
Cloud migration is an expensive investment for any enterprise infrastructure. Followed by migration, cloud management again costs money which is why it is important to optimize various factors that not only lower the cost but also provide extra benefits to the cloud infrastructure.
1. Understanding the Shared Responsibility Model
As the name suggests, the Azure shared responsibility model is a firm understanding of the division of responsibilities between the customer and Microsoft. For instance, the high-level responsibilities like data governance and rights management, client endpoints, account and access management for IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and on-premises are always retained by the customer.
When it comes to application, network controls, operating system, identity, and director infrastructure; these are equally shared by both parties and vary by service type. However, physical hosting, networking, and datacenter are majorly taken care of by Microsoft as these responsibilities are transferred to the cloud provider.
2. Securing Identity with Azure Active Directory
There are a variety of storage options offered by various cloud vendors which can increase the overall cloud performance and provide cost cuttings. Cleaning up storage during the cloud migration is another effective way to enhance cloud performance. Keeping factors like performance, retention, and access patterns in mind; the storage can be further optimized.
The performance of any data can be directly influenced by the location of the data. For instance, the data is stored in a multi-regional location that is potentially closer to the end-users which enhances the overall availability of data and performance of users.
Retaining the required data which is valuable today as well as tomorrow and getting rid of the rest can help you enhance the life cycle of data storage.
It is important to keep a check on the means used by end-users to access your data. It helps you control the amount of storage and can eventually reduce the cost.
3. Control Network Access
Similar to any other data center, network access in Azure needs to be controlled as well. This can be achieved by establishing multiple rings of security around the protected resources like and as an Azure firewall or a third party virtual network appliance solution can be the first ring. This assists in intrusion detection and intrusion prevention systems, web content filtering, application controls, and antivirus.
Undesired traffic can be prevented from entering or leaving the Azure subnet with the help of a Network Security Group(NSG) which is often applied as a second ring to the subnet. The third ring includes NSG applied to the virtual machine network interface which allows you to control traffic to and from the virtual machine.
4. Protecting and Updating your Virtual Machine
The server operating systems need to be protected similarly to an on-premise data center. From running antivirus and anti Malware, windows defender advanced threat protection can also be integrated with is your security center to provide a single location for VM security management.
System updates are required by Microsoft for VMs hosted in Azure which can be done within an automated update management method offered by Azure. The security center is also capable of finding missing critical security updates and applying them automatically.
5. Enabling Encryption
Encryption has become a popular method of protecting data, at rest and in transit, especially in Microsoft Azure. While in most of the cases the encryption is enabled by default, sometimes it needs to be enabled manually. Managed disks automatically encrypted with Storage Service Encryption. However, Azure Disk Encryption needs to be enabled manually to encrypt various drives.
