Deployment of IT services and applications in the cloud using Microsoft Azure is a common way to build or extend infrastructure. This is especially true for organizations with existing investments and deployments on-premises built using the Microsoft server stack. For them, it is much easier to deploy additional cloud resources on Azure in a hybrid-cloud setup than using a different cloud stack from another supplier such as AWS.
A benefit of deploying to the cloud in Azure is reducing the server admin activity load. Microsoft is responsible for ensuring that the resources used in Azure by external organizations are available and that data gets replicated between cloud datacenters for resilience. (Note: you should still implement a suitable backup strategy - your data is your responsibility.)
Security is still the ultimate responsibility of any organization using cloud infrastructure on Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, or any other cloud service provider. While it is true that cloud platform providers will have basic security built into their systems, it’s still vital that appropriate security gets applied over and above this. Just because you are using the cloud does not mean that your security concerns have flown off into the clouds as well.
What Should you do to Secure Azure?
In early December, we held a webinar and discussion about Securing against Cybersecurity attacks in Microsoft Azure to address this question. In this one-hour session, Critical Insight’s Jeremy Johnson (Director Adversary Replication & Detection) and Mike Simon (Chief Technology Officer) covered the main threats, attack types, and defenses against security attacks targeting Azure. They also touch on these points for AWS and how organizations using both can protect their multi-cloud environments.
If you use Azure, the video recording of the webinar will be a good way to spend an hour of your time. If you have any questions after watching the recording, contact Critical Insight through the form below.