Take simple steps to start securing and managing Azure VMs

Take simple steps to start securing and managing Azure VMs

There are three simple steps you can start with to ensure your Azure cloud is Secure & well-managed:

1. Secure your Azure resources such as virtual machines, workloads, and apps with Azure Security Center.

With Azure Security Center you can gain full visibility and control of your cloud security state with a single, unified view:

  • Collect security data from multiple sources: Collect, search, and analyze security data from a variety of sources, including connected partner solutions like network firewalls and other Microsoft services.
  • Integration with existing security workflows: Access, integrate, and analyze security information using REST APIs to connect existing tools and processes.
  • Easily onboard cloud resources: Keep pace with rapidly changing cloud workloads. Automatically discover and onboard new resources created in your Azure subscriptions.
  • Continuous security assessment: monitor the security of virtual machines, networks, and Azure services using hundreds of built-in security assessments or create your own.
  • Built-in dashboards provide instant insights into security issues that require attention.
  • Centralized policy management: Ensure compliance with company or regulatory security requirements by centrally managing security policies across all your cloud workloads.
  • Compliance reporting: Use security data and insights to demonstrate compliance and easily generate evidence for auditors.
  • (If asked whether Azure Security Center supports hybrid workloads, the answer is yes: manage security across all your hybrid cloud workloads – on-premises, Azure, and other cloud platforms – in one console.)
simple steps you can start with to ensure your Azure cloud

You can also identify and mitigate risks proactively to reduce your exposure to security threats:

  • Proactive security assessment: Identify software and configurations that are vulnerable to attack.
  • Actionable recommendations: Remediate security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by attackers with prioritized, actionable security recommendations and built-in automation playbooks.
  • Adaptive application controls: Block malware and other unwanted applications by applying whitelisting recommendations adapted to your specific workloads and powered by machine learning.
  • Controlled network access: Reduce the network attack surface with just-in-time, controlled access to management ports on Azure VMs, drastically reducing exposure to brute force and other network attacks.

Azure Security Center has robust capabilities to prevent attacks. When threats do happen, Security Center can quickly detect and respond to threats with advanced analytics and Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph.

Industry’s most extensive threat intelligence: Tap into the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, which uses trillions of signals from Microsoft services and systems around the globe to identify new and evolving threats.

Advanced threat detection: Use built-in behavioral analytics and machine learning to identify attacks and zero-day exploits. Monitor networks, machines, and cloud services for known attack patterns and post-breach activity.

Prioritized alerts and incidents: Focus on the most critical threats first with prioritized security alerts and incidents that map alerts of different types into a single attack campaign. Create your own custom security alerts as well.

Streamlined investigation: Quickly assess the scope and impact of an attack with a visual, interactive experience. Use predefined or ad hoc queries for deeper exploration of security data.

Contextual threat intelligence: Visualize the source of attacks on an interactive world map. Use built-in threat intelligence reports to gain valuable insight into the techniques and objectives of known malicious actors.

2.Protect your data in Azure with Azure Backup

Protect against ransomware and human errors

Protecting against ransomware is top of mind for every chief security officer and security professional. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts global ransomware damage costs will exceed $5 billion in 2017 and will continue to grow. That’s a 15X increase from 2015.

In addition to malware and malicious attacks, data also gets corrupted or lost due to human errors, such as coding an application incorrectly or inadvertently striking the wrong computer key. Studies show about 30% or more of data corruption or loss is caused due to human errors, right behind the data loss caused by malicious attacks.

The good news is that Azure Backup helps you protect against ransomware and human errors. Some features to highlight:

  • Enable just-in-time access for authorized users based on multi factor authentication to prevent unauthorized use.
  • Monitor backup activities so you can detect anomalies and issues.
  • Retain deleted backup data for up to 14 days so you can easily recover data corrupted due to human errors.
  • Store your backup data in any Azure region around the globe to meet your risk mitigation strategy while keeping your data close to your branch offices for fast recovery.

Meet compliance goals with data retention and encryption

  • Azure has the most comprehensive compliance portfolio available.
  • Enjoy up to 99 years of retention for your backup data.
  • Your backup data is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Start backup in minutes and restore data quickly when needed

  • Choose Backup from the VM blade and set up your backup in minutes with three simple steps.
  • Only pay for what you use and restore data with no additional costs.
  • Quickly restore your data to minimize business interruption with 99.9% service availability.
  • Restore individual files or folders or the entire VM based on your business needs.

3. Continuously monitor your cloud health with Azure Log Analytics.

Collect and store your data from any source

  • Easily collect, store, and analyze your systems and operational data from any source, both on-premises and in the cloud.
  • Collect data from a wide range of sources including virtual machines, storage accounts, activity logs, Windows, Linux Servers, Java, .NET, legacy and modern apps.
  • Centrally store activity logs, network logs, infrastructure metrics, app data points, diagnostics logs and alerts.

Gain deep operational insights

  • Understand CPU disk and memory utilization for your virtual machines.
  • Get a comprehensive view of applications and network dependencies across multiple virtual machines to perform root-cause analysis more quickly.
  • Track configuration changes, system updates, and malware status to improve security & compliance.
  • Visualize data in intuitive and customizable dashboards.
  • Find the information you need quickly using interactive queries and full-text search.

Detect, diagnose and fix issues quickly

  • Get notifications and alerts with rich diagnostic information so you can always stay on top of the issues.
  • Separate the signal from the noise and accelerate root-cause analysis across platforms using advanced analytics including machine learning algorithms.
  • Automate the implementation of recommended fixes so you can address issues quickly.
  • Integrate with customer service systems such as your ticketing tool to speed up implementation of fixes.