Guide to Azure Security

What is Azure Security?

Microsoft Azure is a comprehensive cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of services, including computing, analytics, storage, and networking. Organizations choose Azure for its scalability and flexibility, which enables them to efficiently build and deploy applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.

Azure Security is a suite of security tools that seeks to safeguard the data, applications, and infrastructure hosted on the Azure platform.

Central to how Azure Security operates is the shared responsibility model, in which the cloud service provider (in this case, Microsoft) takes on the responsibility of securing the cloud infrastructure. At the same time, it is the responsibility of customers to protect their data, manage workloads and identities, and address any misconfigurations. The shared responsibility model is a commonly accepted approach for cloud providers and their customers. It emphasizes the importance of customers actively enforcing compliance and security measures within their cloud environments.

In this article, we’ll look at various aspects of Azure Security, from operations and applications to storage and networking. But we’ll also highlight how organizations using Azure Security need to integrate advanced security measures from CrowdStrike Falcon^® Cloud Security to round out their protection.

Before we dive in, let’s lay the groundwork for the role of Microsoft Azure and Azure Security in today’s cloud services industry.

Understanding Microsoft Azure services

Microsoft Azure is a powerful and versatile cloud computing platform that enables businesses to leverage a broad spectrum of cloud services. Let’s explore some of the core categories of Azure services, highlighting how each supports the development and deployment of modern applications and infrastructure.

Operations

Azure offers a range of tools and capabilities to support the management and monitoring of cloud environments. These services include Azure Monitor, which allows teams to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from Azure and on-premises environments. Azure Cloud Automation and Azure Resource Manager streamline workflow automation and resource management, enabling businesses to enforce governance, manage costs, and ensure their deployments are consistent and repeatable.

Applications

Azure provides a rich set of services to support the development, deployment, and scaling of web, mobile, and API apps. For example, Azure App Service and Azure Functions empower developers to build and deploy applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Azure DevOps facilitates continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) to enhance the agility and speed of software development.

Storage

Azure Storage services offer durable, scalable, and redundant storage solutions for data of any size and type. This includes structured data in an Azure SQL database as well as unstructured data in Azure Blob Storage. Azure Storage offers features like geo-redundancy, access tiering, and automated life cycle management.

Networking

Azure Networking services provide the backbone for global connectivity, security, and performance optimization of applications in the Azure cloud. These networking services are essential for building resilient and scalable cloud architectures, and they include:

• Azure Virtual Network
• Azure VPN Gateway
• Azure ExpressRoute
• Azure Load Balancer
• Azure Application Gateway
• Azure Front Door
• Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Through these various services, Microsoft Azure equips organizations with the tools and capabilities they need to succeed in a cloud-first world, enabling them to innovate and scale their operations with confidence.

Azure Security and CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security

As modern organizations increasingly adopt cloud services, the surface area for cyber threats expands. Azure offers an integrated security model — Azure Security — to provide some protection for the underlying infrastructure. Let’s look briefly at some of the components built into Azure Security.

Operations

Azure Security includes tools designed to help you identify, manage, and mitigate threats. These tools provide insights about security incidents, automate responses, and offer a centralized view of the security state of your Azure resources. These tools include Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, among others.

Applications

The applications aspect of Azure Security focuses on protecting the software and services that run in the Azure cloud. Tools in this area include penetration testing, authentication and authorization as part of Azure App Service, and other application diagnostics for basic logging and monitoring.

Storage

Storage security focuses on protecting data at rest and in transit within the Azure environment. Azure offers role-based access control (RBAC), a shared access signature feature for granting limited and controlled access to storage resources, and Azure Storage Analytics for storage logging and metrics.

Networking

As is standard for most major cloud service providers, Azure Security provides the expected networking security basics, such as network security groups, Azure Firewall, and route control through user-defined routes.

Although Azure Security offers basic protections, the growing sophistication and complexity of modern cloud threats are driving Azure-leveraging enterprises to look for more robust protection of their cloud environments. They’re turning to CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, which offers a secure foundation for businesses to operate in the cloud, ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, and availability. In addition, Falcon Cloud Security offers compliance with global and industry-specific standards, making it a reliable solution for organizations that must adhere to strict regulatory requirements.

Enhancing security in Microsoft Azure with CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security

Integrating Azure Security with CrowdStrike Falcon^® Cloud Security for Azure can take your security measures to the next level. Falcon Cloud Security for Azure offers several key features that complement and enhance Azure’s native security capabilities:

• Azure virtual machine (VM) discovery: Gain insights into your Azure VM landscape for enhanced security. This feature automatically discovers VM deployments, providing real-time information and metadata to secure workloads, mitigate risks, and reduce the attack surface.
• Comprehensive visibility into Azure workloads: Continuously monitor for events, gaining in-depth visibility into Azure workload activities. This is essential for proactive threat hunting and investigations, covering activities within containers and ephemeral workloads.
• Container security: Falcon Cloud Security for Azure secures both the host and containers with a single agent. It provides detailed monitoring of container activities — including start, stop, and runtime information — ensuring comprehensive security for all containerized applications.
• Runtime protection: Run cloud workload protection (CWP) on your Azure workloads during their most vulnerable phase: runtime. This feature combines advanced technologies like AI-native indicators of attack (IOAs) and integrated threat intelligence, offering robust protection against active threats.
• Security and compliance enforcement: Falcon Cloud Security for Azure provides cloud security posture management (CSPM) for continuously monitoring and enforcing your application’s security posture. It ensures compliance with internal policies and external regulations, identifying and rectifying misconfigurations and compliance deviations in real time.
• Cloud identity security: Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) focuses on identity and access management, managing cloud entitlements and identities effectively. It ensures that only authorized users have access to specific resources, reducing the risk of excessive permissions and enforcing least privilege access principles.
• Application security: Falcon Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) provides a scalable way to manage applications running in Azure and across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.

These features of Falcon Cloud Security for Azure complement and enhance the existing security measures in Microsoft Azure, providing a more dynamic, comprehensive, and adaptive security framework. For more information about the CrowdStrike Falcon^® platform or Falcon Cloud Security for Azure.

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