Introduction to Azure Security

DevOps Security or DevSecOps is a set of practices and tools that bring together software development (Dev), IT operations (Ops), and security (Sec) to increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services securely. DevOps presents new risks that create security challenges that cannot typically be addressed by conventional security management solutions and practices. One of the prominent security challenges in DevOps environments is privileged access management. DevOps processes require human and machine privileged credentials which are quite powerful and highly susceptible to
cyber-attacks. So strong security practices should be inserted throughout the application lifecycle to reduce vulnerabilities, improve security posture and mitigate risk.

Why Security is needed?

A foundation-stone of DevOps is the concept of “Infrastructure as Code.” By applying this concept to security—illustrating, and managing security policy as code—organizations can eliminate manually intensive, error-prone configuration processes.
All vulnerabilities must be uncovered and addressed before the code is deployed. DevOps security can run tests on the production version to identify whether any issues exist. If they are done, the teams can immediately fix patches or security fixes.
One configuration mistake can easily be injected into a large codebase. With the speed of DevOps environments, it is imperative that teams quickly identify and remediate any errors in configuration. Continuous configuration should be a practice across all codebases.
Further on the issue of access to privileged account credentials, even if the credentials are removed from the software provisioning and deployment tool, they are usually still shared among several members of the DevOps team. This privileged access can be a threat to the organization and needs to be managed. To address this, the team must implement the principle of least privilege, which states that an employee should be given only the access needed to complete their jobs. This reduces the chance of attackers from inside as well as outside the organization gaining access to the code.
DevOps teams use a range of tools to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. However, these all require secrets management, because even in production environments, developers store privileged account credentials, secure shell (SSH) keys, and application programming interface (API) tokens, So using a strong encryption system we can prevent the attacks.

What is Azure Security?

Azure Security refers to security tools and capabilities available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Azure Security Provides visibility and control over the security of Azure resources (like Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Azure Virtual Networks, and Blob Storage).
Azure Security helps us to protect hybrid workloads in the azure and non-azure environment.
Azure security helps us in detecting and block cyber security threats.
With the help of Azure security we can check the cloud environment and helps the customers to understand the status of security.

Let’s Talk about some features present in azure concerning security.

Azure Security Center-

Azure security is the “first Layer” for monitoring the security configuration and health of your workloads.
Azure Security Center collects events from Azure or log analytics agents and associates them with a security analytics engine.
Azure Security Center is more focused on completing compliance checklists. This includes ensuring that the cloud services of your organization meet the necessary regulation compliances and best practices.
Azure Security Center helps the security team to continuously check that cloud services are secure and up to date. It is important to have a dashboard that can inform you when you need to make changes.
Azure Security Center also has a network map – which gives us an interactive graphical view of the network topology of your Azure workloads.

Azure Defender-

Microsoft Defender for cloud is a Cloud Security Posture Management and Cloud Workload Protection Platform for all azure, on-prem cloud.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Provides security alerts, scores, vulnerability assessment, recommendations, and security posture management
Microsoft Defender for Cloud continually compares the configuration of your resources with requirements in industry standards, regulations, and benchmarks.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud continuously discovers new resources that are being deployed across your workloads and assess whether they’re configured according to security best practices.
With Defender for Cloud we get a regulatory compliance dashboard that provides insights into your compliance posture.

Azure Sentinel-

Azure Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native SIEM and SOAR Solution.
Azure Sentinel helps you to bring in the big picture of what’s happening across your environment and connect the dots that might be related to the same security incident.
Azure Sentinel provides one single solution for attack detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat responses.
Azure Sentinel responds to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks.
Azure sentinels provide multiple data connectors which help us to integrate with different services across hybrid cloud environments.

Conclusion-

In simple terms When we talk about Security it has become an important part of the DevOps lifecycle. Azure understands the importance of security for cloud storage and has deployed tools for achieving cybersecurity. The available features and methods indicate that Azure cloud security is good. Azure is responsible for certain cybersecurity aspects and provides the required tools for clients to stay on top of aspects they are responsible for.
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Blog Pundits: Mehul Sharma and Sandeep Rawat

Opstree is an End to End DevOps solution provider.

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