5 Ways Azure Makes Your Enterprise More Secure
Securityis, or should be, a top priority; nothing is more important than makingyour enterprise secure. In this post I’ll tell you 5 ways Azure makesyour enterprise more secure.
First off, Azure is a Microsoft product. When you’re one of theworld’s largest companies, there are an enormous amount of threats thatneed to be evaluated every second of the day. So, obviously Microsoft isaware 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 trillionsignals so they could better understand what kind of information andwhat types of attack vendors there are.
Each month they block over 5 billion distinct malwarethreats. And they staff over 3500 security professionals in theirdefense operations centers to help thwart these attacks. SinceActive Directory is a standard for user authentication control, theyintroduced Azure Active Directory years ago to extend that to theirAzure platform.
All that being said, here are 5 ways that Azure makes your enterprise more secure:
1. Minimize the requirement for password use – Byusing Microsoft Authenticator and connecting to Software as a Serviceapplications (like Drop Box, Salesforce, etc.) The authenticatorreplaces your password with a multi-factor sign in using something likeyour phone and your fingerprint, face ID or a pin based on the Windowsdevice that you’re using.
With a 2-factor authentication when using those devices, you have amore simplified method instead of remembering a bunch of differentpasswords.
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 wherethere are potentials for exposure or for best practices that need to befollowed which helps your organization stay better secured.
3. Microsoft Threat Protection Suite – Helps detect,investigate and remediate issues across your organization, includingendpoints, email, documents, identity and infrastructure elements. Italso helps your security team automate many of those manual, mundanesecurity tasks.
4. Confidentiality – Microsoft was the first cloudvendor 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 recentlyin the news).
Data is always encrypted at rest and in transit. The security willsoon extend to the chip level for added security on certain Azure VMs.Intel has built in some security measures inside their chips and nowMicrosoft is going to interact directly with those chips to keep youmore secure.
5. Microsoft Information Protection Service – Thisenables you to automatically discover, classify, label, protect andmonitor data no matter where it lives or travels on your Microsoftdevices.
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, a feature currently in preview.
But the idea is it’s going to help you protect from things such asPII being extended. So, it’s an added level of protection to ensurethere are no security leaks.
So, it’s clear from all this that Microsoft not only has acommitment to securing their own services and software, but alsoenterprises and individuals are of critical importance when talkingabout 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.