Security the cloud: Three more priorities; The Mint security advantage
In the first part of our series focusing on the essential best practices for security cloud environments using Microsoft Azure, we looked at Identity and Access Management (IAM) and data encryption. This part focuses on how Microsoft Azure can be used across the core areas of threat protection, compliance and security monitoring, and how Mint can help your organisation navigate these best practice approaches effectively.
01: Threat protection
There are several ways in which Azure can help your business better manage the threats. The first is the hugely under-rated Azure Security Centre. This offers you unified security management and advanced threat protection across your entire Azure estate, providing you with rapid security risk assessments and tools you can use to ensure you’re following security best practice throughout.
Then there’s the scalable, cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) solution called Azure Sentinel. The name fits the role. The platform is designed to provide your security teams and decision-makers with intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence at speed so you can detect and respond to threats quickly. Finally, you can boost all these intelligent threat protection and detection resources with Network Security Groups (NSGs) that behave like virtual firewalls. These control your inbound and outbound Azure traffic and you can define and apply NSG rules to protect your critical applications from unauthorised threats and access.
02: Compliance
This is another word that sends ripples of fear through the heart of security professionals and C-suite decision-makers alike. Compliance means staying in line with regulatory expectations, and these are rigorous, constantly changing, and expensive. If your business isn’t compliant or is found lacking in core security areas, you can face hefty fines and run the risk of losing business and reputation.
Fortunately, Azure has tools embedded within its architecture specifically designed to support your commitment to compliance. Azure Policy helps you enforce your standards and assess your compliance posture at scale. You can create, assign and manage policies using the Azure Policy tool and leverage its insights to ensure your resources are complying with your standards and regulatory expectations. Compliance Manager provides you with a dashboard that tracks, assigns and verifies regulatory compliance activities, including built-in assessments for well-known regulations and standards such as ISO 27001 and GDPR. You can also use Azure’s compliance tools to regularly audit your environment, generating audit reports for stakeholders and regulatory bodies.
03: Security monitoring
Use Azure Monitor to collect and analyse telemetry data from your Azure resources for visibility into your application health and performance. This tool can also be used to identify potential security issues and set up alerts that provide you with an effective warning system in the event of an attack or successful breach. Boost this tool with Log Analytics from Azure as it allows you to collect and analyse log data from multiple sources within your environment which, when wedded with your other Azure tools and services, improves your ability to identify anomalies and issues.
Finally, Azure Application Insights is designed to provide you with application-level monitoring with detailed performance and usage metrics. You can use it to monitor your applications for potential vulnerabilities, remove bottlenecks and optimise performance.
The Mint security advantage
