Explaining Azure Security Center
In this, we will learn and understand about Azure Security Center and its services.
Azure Security Center is a unified infrastructure security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers. It provides advanced threat protection across your hybrid workloads in the cloud.
However, Azure Security Center addresses the three most urgent security challenges:
- Firstly, Rapidly changing workloads. It’s both a strength and a challenge of the cloud. On the one hand, end-users are empowered to do more. On the other, how do you make sure that the ever-changing services people are using and creating are up to your security standards and follow security best practices?
- Secondly, Increasingly sophisticated attacks. Wherever you run your workloads, the attacks keep getting more sophisticated. However, you have to secure your public cloud workloads, which are, in effect, an Internet-facing workload that can leave you even more vulnerable if you don’t follow security best practices.
- Lastly, Security skills are in short supply. The number of security alerts and alerting systems far outnumbers the number of administrators with the necessary background and experience to make sure your environments are protected. Staying up-to-date with the latest attacks is a constant challenge, making it impossible to stay in place while the world of security is an ever-changing front.
Further, to help you protect yourself against these challenges, Security Center provides you with the tools to:
1. Strengthen security posture
Azure Security Center enables you to strengthen your security posture. It helps you identify and perform the hardening tasks security best practices and implement them across your machines, data services, and apps. Further, this includes managing and enforcing your security policies. And, it makes sure that Azure virtual machines, non-Azure servers, and Azure PaaS services are compliant.
Manage organization security policy and compliance
It’s security basic to know and make sure your workloads are secure, and it starts with having tailored security policies in place. Because all the policies in Security Center are built on top of Azure Policy controls. And, you’re getting the full range and flexibility of a world-class policy solution. In Security Center, you can set your policies to run on management groups, across subscriptions, and even for a whole tenant.
Continuous assessments
Security Center continuously discovers new resources that are being deployed across your workloads and assesses whether they are configured according to security best practices. However, if not, they are flagged and you get a prioritized list of recommendations for what you need to fix in order to protect your machines.
Network map
One of the most powerful tools Security Center provides for continuously monitoring the security status of your network is the Network map. The map enables you to see the topology of your workloads, so you can see if each node is properly configured. You can see how your nodes are connected. Because this helps you block unwanted connections that make it easy for an attacker to creep along with your network.
2. Protect against threats
Security Center’s threat protection enables you to detect and prevent threats at the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer, non-Azure servers as well as for Platforms as a Service (PaaS) in Azure. Further, Security Center’s threat protection includes fusion kill-chain analysis. This can automatically correlate alerts in your environment depending on cyber kill-chain analysis.
Protect PaaS
Security Center helps you detect threats across Azure PaaS services. You can detect threats targeting Azure services including Azure App Service, Azure SQL, Azure Storage Account, and more data services. You can also take advantage of the native integration with Microsoft Cloud App Security’s User and Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA). With this, you can perform anomaly detection on your Azure activity logs.
Block brute force attacks
Security Center helps you limit exposure to brute force attacks. By reducing access to virtual machine ports, using just-in-time VM access, you can harden your network by preventing unnecessary access. You can set secure access policies on selected ports. This is for only users having authentication, source IP address ranges, or IP addresses with allowance, and for a limited amount of time.
Protect data services
Security Center includes capabilities that help you perform automatic classification of your data in Azure SQL. However, you can also get assessments for potential vulnerabilities across Azure SQL and Storage services. And, also recommendations for how to mitigate them.
3. Get secure faster
Native Azure integration combined with seamless integration with other Microsoft security solutions, such as Microsoft Cloud App Security and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. This helps to make sure your security solution is comprehensive as well as simple to onboard and roll out.
Reference: Microsoft Documentation