What are the best security practices for Microsoft Azure? Microsoft recently announced that several analytical tools, new capabilities and products have been introduced to combat security threats.
In a blog post, Bret Arsenault, chief information security officer at Microsoft, mentioned, "New capabilities in Azure Security Center available for preview include Just In Time network access to VMs [virtual machines], predictive application whitelisting and expanded Security Baselines with more than 100 recommended configurations defined by Microsoft and industry partners".
Microsoft Windows Azure ensures that your data remains secure with multiple layers of security and governance technologies. There also are operational practices and compliance policies to help maintain privacy and integrity of data. Azure offers a variety of ways to protect data as per the security norms of an organization.
Even though Microsoft Azure offers many security features, the IT Admin has to take responsibility for the security of their data, operating system and applications in the Cloud. While building Azure’s secure environment, ensuring security features within Azure infrastructure is the first key step. Security has to be ensured and embedded at various levels: network, application and administrative. For the IT Admin, it is important to identify the different states that data can be in to be able to define its security norms. For example, data can be at rest, which refers to data that is stored in physical media. In-transit data is the data that is transferred between different locations like data transfers between virtual networks. Data inuse means the data that is in the virtual memory or information that is being acted upon during a process.
The responsibility for security on Microsoft Azure is a joint responsibility of Azure and the customer. The intent of Microsoft is to provide a secure platform that can accommodate the security norms of the customer.