Best Practice Fundamentals of Microsoft Azure Cloud Security

The articles below are Best practices fundamental of Azure cloud security to use when designing, deploying and managing your cloud solutions using Azure. These best practices come from our experience of Azure Security and the experiences of customers like you.

1. Identity Management with Azure Active Directory

As before, it is important that it is possible to use multi-factor authentication to counter attacks from phishing and lost or compromised credentials. At a minimum, any Azure Active Directory user with the ability to create and change administrative roles or resources must have multi-factor authentication enabled. 

It is easy to lose track of what permissions exist within custom roles. Audit any custom role definitions to ensure that no one has unnecessary administrative permissions that can be specified through default roles.

Ensure that no unnecessary guest users are created in Azure Active Directory. For any required, make sure that the user setting is set to limit guest permissions as well as to not allow guests to invite additional users.

If you are using Active Directory Federation Services to allow the user to sign in to Azure-AD based services with your on-premises password, it is important that you protect your on-premises Active Directory Are also auditing and complying with a vulnerability assessment. And monitoring equipment.

Must Visit: Cloud Computing Training in Chandigarh

2. The Microsoft Azure Security Center

Microsoft Azure Security Center has many security features available to us, to take advantage of which Microsoft has automated its Good Deal discovery and implementation.

It is important to enabling virtual machine security data collection by default through automatic provisioning of the monitoring agent function. Once the monitoring agent is enabled, you should make sure that all recommendation settings are enabled in the security policy. 

You should make a habit of reviewing the Recommendations tab within the blades of the Safety Center to ensure no active safety work exists, and to ensure that any recommendations are implemented wherever possible.

Ensure that a current security contact email and phone number is set in the Security Center policy. This ensures that Microsoft has accurate contact within your organization for any security-related incidents.

Finally, consider upgrading from Free Azure Security Tier to Standard Tier for enhanced security options. This comes at a cost, but it allows for threat detection on virtual machines and databases.

3. Networking with Microsoft SQL Server

It is important to limit the risk of brute force attacks by limiting access to RDP in your network security groups. This advice does not matter that stage; Do not port 22 or 3389 to the open Internet.

If you are running Microsoft SQL Server, there is a separate SQL Server firewall mechanism that exists outside the Network Security Group function. You should audit the SQL Server firewall to ensure that you have not allowed access to the open Internet or network blocks that do not require access.

It still makes sense to use operating system firewalls within virtual machines to provide in-depth defence in case of accidental network security group misunderstandings or a stage error.

4. Logging with Ample Storage Retention

There are many logging capabilities within Microsoft Azure, and using them for security auditing and compliance is critical. Make sure you have enabled Activity Log Storage, which we will use to create monitoring alerts for various behaviours ahead.

Also, each network security group must have flow logging enabled, and every SQL Server database must have database auditing enabled. Each of these logging capabilities uses a storage account. For each logging function, you should create a storage account comfortably encrypted in transit through the "Storage Service Encryption" setting and through the "Secure Transfer Required" setting.

It also recommends that you enable log storage retention for more than 90 days or set retention for unlimited if possible for each logging case.

Must Read:  AWS Training in Chandigarh

5. Monitoring with Activity Log Alerts

Activity logs enable us to monitor for various security-relevant events. Alerts allow us to ensure that appropriate parties are informed of behaviour that may not be approved, such as changing security settings.

Activity log alerts should be created for the following events:

  • Create a policy assignment
  • Create or update the network security group
  • Delete Network Security Group
  • Create or update network security group rules
  • Remove Network Security Group Rule
  • Create or update SQL Server firewall rules
  • Delete SQL server firewall rules
  • Create or update a security solution
  • Remove security solution
  • Update security policy

6. Cloud Storage Account Security

We have previously mentioned making sure that logs are stored in storage accounts with SSL and disk encryption. Where possible, you should configure each storage account to use drop encryption, file encryption, and secure transfer.

Storage account keys should be periodically revived to reduce the risk of compromised access keys. Shared entry signatures should only be used with secure transfer and have an expiration period of eight hours or less so that access is not approved indefinitely.

Any public access to the blob or file containers should be carefully audited to ensure that it is used only in cases such as public web sites.

7. Virtual Machine Security Data

A unique aspect of Azure virtual machine security is the virtual machine agent that collects security data as described above. Keeping the agent current ensures proper observation of your property.

However, the most important thing is that securing virtual machines in the cloud works in the same way as premises and it has been discussed at length. Ensure that you have the latest operating system and software patches and are running endpoint protection. Make sure that you are using disk encryption to encrypt files in case of storage compromise.