5 mins to read
Microsoft Azure is one of the safest and most flexible cloud platforms on the market. Azure contains a range of configurable security tools and supports numerous types of security services and features. This enables you to expand Azure’s monitoring and remediation capabilities and achieve an advanced level of cybersecurity proficiency.
Read on for an overview of Azure cloud security tools, some of the provided azure security features, and a look at how you can fortify your security posture on top of Microsoft’s robust cloud platform.
Azure’s top native cloud security tools and features
Azure contains an extensive list of built-in security offerings that you can use to strengthen your cloud environment. As you begin exploring the Azure platform, keep these tools in mind.
Sentinel
Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native solution for security information and event monitoring (SIEM.) Sentinel offers threat intelligence and security analytics and empowers security teams to act with greater speed and responsiveness using a single dashboard.
Defender for Cloud
Defender for Cloud is a powerful cloud security posture management (CSPM) tool. Its main purpose is to identify cloud vulnerabilities and help businesses handle evolving threats. This tool also lets you remediate security issues from a central location, which saves time and effort for team members.
Application Insights
Application Insights is an extensible application performance management (APM) solution. Using this tool, you can monitor live web applications and discover performance issues. It also provides analytics and performance anomaly detection.
Resource Manager
Resource Manager is a system deployment and management service that you can use to create and manage Azure assets. Resource Manager also offers template-based deployments, which can replace manual deployments and reduce configuration errors.
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor provides ongoing security alerts for events that arise from Azure and activity logs. This tool supports data querying, routing, and visualization.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Microsoft provides a secure WAF component in the Azure Application Gateway. WAF helps protect applications from threats like session hijacking and SQL injection.
How to Take Azure Security to the Next Level
As you can see, Microsoft already provides a strong foundation of security options for customers through the Azure platform. That being the case, your company can further reduce cloud security threats by taking the next step.
You can further bolster your security by integrating a third-party cloud security platform like Sonrai Dig into your environment for a well-rounded approach to securing the cloud tackling identity, data, platform, and workload risks.
Sonrai Dig runs on a sophisticated graph that identifies and monitors relationships between cloud data and identities. The tool complements Microsoft Azure security tools by providing a single view for incident response and security management. With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at how Sonrai Dig secures Azure environments.
Workload security
Vulnerabilities are a classic entryway to your environment for malicious attackers. Dig includes an agentless vulnerability scanner, or seamlessly integrates with external scanners to deepen your insights. Because of Dig’s identity graphing and analytics insights, vulnerability risks are more contextualized so your team knows where its focus is most needed.
Identity security
Dig exposes how person and non-person identities interact with resources in Azure based on their effective permissions. Dig analytics models all potential attack paths no matter how many degrees of separation (i.e. trust relationships) stand between an identity and its access. So your team can reveal toxic combinations, dormant identities, privilege escalation risks and the effective permissions of all identities in your cloud.With these insights, you can more effectively monitor identity and data access as it changes over time.
Data security
Dig helps you discover where your data truly is no matter what database or datastore it’s in – classify & tag it based on business value (using pre-built or custom features), and monitor who or what is accessing it. This enables you to place policies on the data itself, helping you to enforce Least Access and monitor critical resources. Suspicious access activity or undesirable changes in access rights are automatically flagged and audited for continuous compliance. That’s right, Dig preserves the activity of every identity inside your secret stores and databases, meaning changes to keys and critical data are captured.
Platform security
Cloud platform security is critical for securing your environment infrastructure at the foundation. Unfortunately, misconfigurations are common causes of enterprise breaches as it’s far too easy to not configure basic controls like logging or authentication, leaving your assets exposed. Dig utilizes Azure APIs to identify resource configurations and discover poor controls. The platform includes next-generation CSPM checks backed by identity and data context helping to make alerts actionable and prioritized.
Intelligent workflow and automated remediation
When it comes to addressing security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations or identity and access risks, time is of the essence. Missing the opportunity to remediate the most pressing risks can lead to breaches or compliance issues. Dig provides intelligent workflows to bring the right teams the right alerts in an organized fashion that reflects how your organization is structured. With Dig you can also rely on deploying automated remediation bots for prevention or remediation.
Locking down Azure with Dig
Microsoft offers a variety of azure security tools, but they only scratch the surface. If you want to go even further, you can easily integrate Sonrai Dig and leverage real-time cloud security monitoring and management tools.
Sonrai is now a Preferred Solution on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association. To better understand how Microsoft and Sonrai work together, explore our partnership.
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