First off, Azure is a Microsoft product. When you’re one of the world’s largest companies, there are an enormous amount of threats that need to be evaluated every second of the day. So, obviously Microsoft is aware of these challenges.
With that in mind, Microsoft developed centers of excellence over the past ten years in order to be ready for these attacks. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center processed over 6.5 trillion signals so they could better understand what kind of information and what types of attack vendors there are.
Each month they block over 5 billion distinct malware threats. And they staff over 3500 security professionals in their defense operations centers to help thwart these attacks. Since Active Directory is a standard for user authentication control, they introduced Azure Active Directory years ago to extend that to their Azure platform.
All that being said, here are 5 ways that Azure makes your enterprise more secure:
1. Minimize the requirement for password use – By using Microsoft Authenticator and connecting to Software as a Service applications (like Drop Box, Salesforce, etc.) The authenticator replaces your password with a multi-factor sign in using something like your phone and your fingerprint, face ID or a pin based on the Windows device that you’re using.
With a 2-factor authentication when using those devices, you have a more simplified method instead of remembering a bunch of different passwords.
2. Security Scorecard – A while back I did a post on the Azure Secure Score and the Secure Score Center. With this, you’re using the Azure portal for having awareness where there is potential for exposure or for best practices that need to be followed which helps your organization stay better secured.
3. Microsoft Threat Protection Suite – Helps detect, investigate and remediate issues across your organization, including endpoints, email, documents, identity and infrastructure elements. It also helps your security team automate many of those manual, mundane security tasks.
4. Confidentiality – Microsoft was the first cloud vendor to introduce confidential integrity in data while it’s in use. So, consumers don’t worry about their data being put in the wrong hands (like some of those other clouds vendors you may have heard of recently in the news).
Data is always encrypted at rest and in transit. The security will soon extend to the chip level for added security on certain Azure VMs. Intel has built in some security measures inside their chips and now Microsoft is going to interact directly with those chips to keep you more secure.
5. Microsoft Information Protection Service – This enables you to automatically discover, classify, label, protect and monitor data no matter where it lives or travels on your Microsoft devices.
We’re now seeing many more open source capabilities and seeing more of these applications being sent over to Macs and Linux PCs for instance. Essentially this labeling capability is built into office apps and such across all the major platforms and can add protection capability to things like PDF documents that are currently in preview.
But the idea is it’s going to help you protect from things such as PII being extended. So, it’s an added level of protection to ensure there are no security leaks.
So, it’s clear from all this that Microsoft not only has a commitment to securing their own services and software, but also enterprises and individuals are of critical importance when talking about security.
If you’re concerned about security, check out some of the things I mentioned here and remember, Microsoft is making the investment and doing all they can to keep things secure. Have more questions about cloud security or anything cloud or Azure related? You’re in the right place. Click the link below or contact us – we’re here to help you every step of the way.