Before coming to the Azure security center, we have to understand why we need security in the first place. Every day, hackers try to get into our system to steal the data and demand ransom. An excellent security system should be up and running 24 x7. So how does Azure Security center helps in that? Let’s dive in to find the answer.
In this blog, I will cover everything you should know about Azure Security Center
This post covers:
- Introduction
- Azure Security Center
- What is a Secure Score?
- How is the Secure Score Calculated?
- Security Alerts
- Response to security alerts
- Azure defender
- Conclusion
Introduction to Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center is a service provided by Microsoft that will give you the recommendation to eliminate the security threat and increase the security score. It is offered free of cost, but we will see it further in this article. If you want to use Azure Defender, it comes with a cost. Irrespective of the subscription, Azure Security Center will analyze all your resources and give possible security recommendations like enabling firewall or put NSG, etc.
What is Azure Security Center?
It is a security management system to improve the security of your data center, not only on the azure but it also provides advanced threat protection across hybrid workload, which mean along with azure it can also protect your on-premise data center as well if you are using multi-cloud (some part hosted in Azure and some on AWS/GCP) then it can also provide security recommendation over there.
As we all know, security is a two-way process in azure means it’s a joint responsibility of both the customer and the service provider. The burden of the customer is more when you are using IaaS (infrastructure as a service ) than PaaS (platform as a service ) than SaaS ( software as a service )
Azure Security Center protects both virtual machines and non-azure services, whether in the cloud or on-premise environment, for both servers (Linux and Windows), by installing the log analytics agent on them. The events collected by agents and azure are correlated in the analytics engine to provide you best recommendations.
Azure Security Center combines with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection to automatically protect your environment. The entire process is automated so that you do not need to create any rules and check for violations.
After these features are running, you get protection for:
- PaaS protection: Discovery of threats against Azure services such as Azure App Service, Azure Storage Account, Azure SQL, Combination with Microsoft Cloud App Security’s User and Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA) enables you to detect unusual activity on your Azure activity logs.
- Brute force attacks protection: You can narrow access to virtual machine ports and prevent random network connections. Secure Center enables you to implement specific policies on selected ports for explicitly allowed users and, in the meantime, set a limited access period for particular IP address ranges or individual IP addresses.
- Data services protection: You can assess Azure SQL and Storage services for potential security holes and get suggestions on how to mitigate security risks
- IoT and hybrid cloud workloads protection: You can support Defender for IoT for adaptive and intelligent threat protection and response. This tool protects your workloads running on edge clouds, on-premises, in Azure, as well as other clouds.
What is a Secure Score?
As you must have known by now that the azure security center has two goals :
- It helps you understand your current security situation.
- It helps you improve your security situation by giving recommendations.
A secure score is a way to achieve your goal: the higher the score, the lower the risk level.
To improve the percentage, review Security center recommendations for the pending actions. Proposals also include steps to follow to achieve the goal.
How is the Secure Score Calculated?
Each recommendation has some points assigned to it. If you apply that recommendation, the score will automatically increase. Each proposal will have a maximum score and current score, as shown in the figure.
Few formulas are used by azure to calculate the score, which you as a user don’t need to worry about. You need to follow the security recommendations provided by the Azure Security Center.
Security Alerts
As we know that the Azure Security Center automatically collects, analyzes, and integrates the log data from your Azure resources. A list of high-priority alerts will automatically be generated, as shown in the figure.
You can filter the alerts based on status, severity, time and add a custom filter.
Response to security alerts
If you want to take action on any particular alerts, select that alert, and on the right-hand side, you can see the detailed view, and you can either view full details or take action.
View Full Details:
Take action:
The different steps one can take are:
- Mitigate the threat: Provide a manual solution for the alert.
- Prevent further attack: Provide security recommendations to help reduce the attack.
- Trigger automated response: Provide an option of a logic app to trigger automatically.
- Suppress similar attacks: suppress if that alert is not relevant to your organization.
Azure defender
Azure defender comes with a price under Azure Security Center. You can try Azure defender for free for up to 30 days; then, you have to upgrade to the standard plan. Pricing varies as per the resources.
Previously Azure Security Center used to have two tiers, free and Standard. So Standard tier is now renamed as Azure Defender with some added capabilities.
- Azure Defender protects your VM, data, Storage, and other native services against common threats. It works on both Windows and Linux, powered by Machine Learning with a built-in vulnerability assessment.
- Azure Defender continuously scan installed application for any type of vulnerability irrespective of whether your workload is running in Azure, on-premise or other clouds.
- It can detect unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit storage accounts and block malware uploads.
Conclusion:
With the help of Azure Security Cente, we monitor inside Azure, like what’s going on, and not only in azure, and we can also monitor inside AWS or Google (in case of the multi-cloud environment ) as well as on-premise. It will give you the best recommendation to improve your security score as this is the era of cyberattacks. One must secure their data; an azure defender is like an extra layer, or we can say that cherry on top of the pie to ensure your overall environment security. What do you think? Let me know in the comment.
References:
- Microsoft Azure Secure Network Connectivity: Firewall, DDOS, & NSG
- Microsoft Azure Security Technologies: Step By Step Activity Guides
- Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Certification
Next Task For You
In this blog, we discussed the overview of Azure Security Center; if you want to know more about the Microsoft Azure Security Technologies and certification. Click on the below image and Register for our FREE CLASS Now!
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