Azure from Microsoft offers a suite of cloud computing services that are used to create, deploy and monitor real-time applications. However, with the ease of working with these applications on the cloud comes the threat of losing valuable data. Hence, Azure added the cloud security package as well to the suite. So, what does this addition manages?
Azure Cloud Security checklist: 5 Things You Need to Cross Off Your Checklist
The Azure cloud security checklist talks about the various aspects and situations that the security team should always check to ensure the established connections are secured to the highest level.
Let’s have a look at the checklist:
1. IAM utilization:
Identity and Access Management is an integral part of any cloud service provider as it allows the operation security team to grant just the right permissions to the right individuals. There is the usage of groups, users to allocate permissions that control the access to the security configuration of the projects.
Apart from this, Azure offers a Password rest registration activity report just for the client to assist them in monitoring accounts of registered users. Further, the account encryption is carried out by MFA (multi-factor authentication) protocol for all its users for remote access to its services.
While we are on the page about remote access, there is an option for users to access the SaaS applications by using the Single Sign-on feature as well applicable for users with organizational accounts.
2. Data storage and collection:
To ensure the security of storage accounts make use of Azure RBAC (role-based access control. Moving ahead, to use HTTP requests for transporting data, Azure advises using SMB protocol (Server message block protocols).
To ensure encryption of virtual machine disk files, as well as data disks in the OS, Storage service encryption or Azure Disk encryption, can be put to use.
3. Follow up security policies:
As per Azure’s security policies, use Azure Security Centre for deploying endpoints. For web applications, the WAF (web application firewall) protocol is a proven solution offered by the CSP. However, to further increase the security a client of Azure is free to use firewall services from Microsoft partners as well.
To keep an eye on unlawful access to customer’s data Microsoft Security response center monitors manages this is subscription is availed by the client.
4. Successful monitoring:
Just going the extra mile, Azure allows you to generate monitoring logs for the presence of malware or antimalware protection as well for the client’s infrastructure. There is an additional feature of Update assessment that allows the client to check the potential security threat along with the critical nature of these detected threats.
5. DevOps (Developer Options):
DevOps is indeed a hot topic for the IT industry but has a special role at Azure as well. It offers CI/CD to make sure the job of merging as well as testing the code goes smoothly. Other than that it works to find out the defects before they reach production.
Even more, comes on the plate with generation oh health logs. This is done for the applications already running on the production environment and ensure that the infrastructure and even the app behavior is just right to serve the traffic as well as user requests.
Under the hood of DevOps, there is another section called auto-scaling and load testing. This helps in managing the incoming traffic and splitting it across servers to maintain a healthy deployment, quality service from the application which includes catering to business needs right on time.
Conclusion
The checklist options that we just went through is the guide curated by Azure itself so that every client can test their set up and ensure the highest level of security.
