As the world continues to move towards a cloud-based future, understanding and prioritising cyber security has become crucial. As a leading provider of public cloud services, Microsoft have sophisticated built-in security services in Azure that help keep your business safe.
In this blog, we’ll go through some of the key Azure security features and explain how you can implement them to protect your organisation from advanced threats.
The importance of cloud security
As businesses increasingly rely on cloud computing for their operations, implementing robust cloud security measures is vital in order to protect sensitive data, guard against cyber threats, and ensure uninterrupted service delivery. However, implementing robust security is not always simple, this could be down to:
- Misconfiguration: Configuring your cloud setup is difficult. Whilst malicious actors are a worry, a lot of vulnerabilities simply come from human error and misconfiguration of cloud servers. If not set up properly, a cloud server can be easily accessible by anyone, meaning that secure and thorough configuration is crucial.
- Malicious attackers: As companies move to the cloud, hackers and other criminals have begun to find new ways to take advantage of vulnerabilities and exploits to create a new cloud-focused line of attack. By failing to consider cloud security properly, there is a chance that attackers can find margins of vulnerabilities and take advantage of them.
Due to these factors, implementing solid cloud security should be a business priority, however the cloud can also be one of the best ways to secure your business when used effectively. Microsoft Azure is filled with cloud-powered applications and tools that can help protect your business from online vulnerabilities, all of which can be utilised within your Microsoft system and infrastructure.
Microsoft Azure advanced security features
Secure Score
Found within Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Secure Score helps you figure out exactly how secure your organisation is, providing a basis for working out which security steps need to be taken. Secure Score will also give you insights and recommendations for you to increase your score, giving you tangible goals and ways to be able to ensure that your organisation’s security posture is as high as it can be.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is your organisation’s home hub for cloud security. It’s a development security operations (DevSecOps) tool that unifies security at the code level throughout your organisation. Using Microsoft Defender for Cloud, you can protect your cloud-based workloads and implementations while also using a unified tool to ensure organisation-wide security coverage.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Part of Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) that supports multiple deployment modes. With this, you can have multiple security deployments such as log collection, API connectors, and reverse proxy.
This will protect you when utilising SaaS applications, meaning that you can ensure that no vulnerabilities are going to threaten your organisation when utilising the tools that you need to be able to do your work. Furthermore, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps integrates with Microsoft applications seamlessly.
Azure Network Security
Azure Network Security protects your applications and cloud workloads from network-based cyber attacks. Using DevSecOps, you can implement a zero-trust policy in your organisation to keep your cloud data safe and ensure access is only given to those who need it.
Azure Network Security is deployable in multiple versatile methods, meaning that it can easily adapt to fit your organisation’s needs. With this, ensuring that your network is secure and fortified against external threats is simple and easily configurable through the Azure Network Security control panel.
Microsoft Entra Permissions Management
Using Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, you can further restrict access to your most sensitive files to only those who need it. This principle, known as the principle of least privilege, is a common necessity for lots of organisations worldwide, and Entra Permissions Management lets you automate the whole process. This makes the process of cloud-based permissions far more efficient, saving your organisation time and resources.
Microsoft Sentinel
Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable solution that offers two primary forms of security:
- Security information and event management (SIEM)
- Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)
Using this, Microsoft Sentinel gives you a birds-eye view of your organisation’s security needs, meaning that you can easily monitor for incoming threats and swiftly take action. From investigation before addressing the threat, to recording the threat for future reference, this is a great tool for any organisation.
Microsoft Sentinel has also inherited the Azure Monitor tamper-proofing and immutability practices, meaning that you can fully protect and control access to your data and quell any worries of it falling into the wrong hands.
How to get started
If you’re looking to get started with Azure security but don’t know how, reach out to our team of experts today. As well as helping you implement Azure security features, we can also provide an Azure Optimisation Review. This will provide a gap analysis on your Azure estate and outline areas for improvement in line with the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework. Advanced will provide a roadmap and help implement changes that will allow your organisation to have a fully governed, secure and resilient infrastructure. Get in touch to learn more.
