Top 10 Azure Security Tools & Features

It’s safe to say many organizations have embraced some form of cloud strategy. Some have adopted a hybrid cloud model, while others have chosen a multi-cloud model with Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, or Infrastructure as a Service. Regardless of the infrastructure choice, businesses must protect and secure these environments. Microsoft Azure offers a range of cloud services and tools to help secure your environment and data. However, it’s crucial to be aware of the critical gaps in Azure’s security tools and features. Let’s dive into Azure’s security tools, their capabilities, and later we will reinforce the areas where we can make improvements.

While cloud services let you offload the management duties of maintaining a physical data center, it’s your responsibility to keep the data safe and available. Protect your data on Microsoft Azure with Veeam Data Platform.

For a comprehensive look at cloud security, explore the cloud security glossary.

Understanding Azure Security Tools and Features

Data breaches and unauthorized access to systems can result in hefty fines, deteriorate a company’s reputation, and lead to lost contracts. That’s why a strong security posture in the cloud is so important. Security in Azure is a multilayered approach consisting of people, technology, and controls implemented to lower risk and mitigate threats. This protects data from loss or damage caused by malicious actors or insider threats.

The layered approach ensures additional defenses are in place to neutralize or slow the threat if a breach occurs, minimizing the potential damage from a malicious actor. For example, if a user’s credentials are compromised, having roles and permissions in place limits the scope of the data malicious actors can access with those credentials.

Security has multiple layers. The Azure layers of security focus on the technology and controls that help build a secure cloud environment. Those technologies include physical, network, perimeter, endpoint, application, and data. The responsibility for securing these layers depends on your organization’s services. For a quick breakdown, let’s refer to the image provided by Microsoft, highlighting who’s responsible for each layer:

When it comes to securing physical components of the stack, such as the data center, hosts, and network, the responsibility falls onto the cloud provider. As you move upwards in the stack, the customer and the cloud provider share responsibility. Whether you use public, private, or multi-cloud environments, the information and data, accounts and identities, and devices used to access the platform are always the customer’s responsibility.

Top 10 Azure Security Tools List

Now that we’ve covered the basics of Azure security, let’s discuss the technologies available in Microsoft Azure and how they can secure your cloud environment.

Azure Defender

Azure Defender, previously known as Azure Security Center, is a security management tool in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. It’s a great starting point to gain higher visibility on your security across your hybrid cloud workloads, on-premises, Azure, and some cloud platforms. You can monitor your workloads via an agent and with controls that use machine learning and threat intelligence to block malware and detect attacks. Some capabilities include the following.

• Centralized policy management: Create a security policy that outlines the conditions you want the environment to adhere to. Quickly identify whether resource configurations violate your security policies.
• Secure score: Get a high-level overview of how resources deployed across environments score in relation to the security protocols determined by the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB). Get recommendations on how you can improve adherence.
• Multiple workloads: Azure Defender offers coverage for cloud servers, cloud databases, and containers, and it can help identify threats to storage resources. Receive real-time alerts based on events that threaten your environment’s

Microsoft Entra ID Protection

Formerly known as Azure Active Directory Identity Protection, Microsoft Entra ID Protection helps customers protect their organizations from identity compromises. Users can quickly identify attacks, report risks, and remediate vulnerabilities with specific actions.

• Dashboard: The dashboard helps analyze security posture and vulnerabilities. Key metrics and insights provide greater visibility, and a map helps pinpoint potential risks.
• Risk detection: Detect risks in real time, including leaked credentials, password sprays, and anonymous IP address usage. Investigate risky users and sign-ins to prevent unauthorized access.
• Remediation options: Automatic and manual remediation actions leverage access controls, such as multifactor authentication or password resets. Data from risk-based actions can be forwarded to SIEM tools.

Azure Key Vault

This centralized cloud service can securely manage, monitor, store, and access secrets, keys, and certificates. You can choose between Standard, which encrypts with a software key, and Premium, which includes hardware security module protected keys. Benefits of Azure Key Vault include the following.

• Centralized secret distribution: Centralization and control of application secrets distribution reduces the risk of secrets being leaked due to developers storing them in code. Secrets can be stored in a secure key vault that can be easily replicated across regions.
• Secret monitoring: Monitor the access and use of keys and secrets by enabling logging for your vaults. Logs can be sent to an event hub, Azure Monitor Logs, or a storage account.
• Improved security: Improve overall security by requiring proper authentication and authorization for a user or an application to get access. Authentication can be configured via Microsoft Entra ID, while authorization can be configured using Azure role-based access control or key vault access policy.

Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel, formerly Azure Sentinel, is similar to Azure Defender. They’re both cloud-native and aim to increase an organization’s security posture. Sentinel takes it one step further by providing additional enhancements to connect to security products outside the Microsoft ecosystem. Security teams can use Microsoft Sentinel for security information, event management, and security orchestration, automation, and response. Consider the benefits below.

• Scalability: Sentinel offers scalability for organizations that have large environments and are looking to use REST-API, Syslog, or event format to connect their data sources to collect, detect, investigate, and respond to threats.
• Threat hunting: You can use Sentinel’s built-in queries to proactively search for security threats across different data sources.
• Customizable playbooks: Playbooks can be customized to automate workflows triggered by alerts or incidents.

Azure Firewall

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native, fully stateful security service that provides threat protection for cloud workloads running in Azure. It offers three options with different feature sets, catering to different organization sizes.

• Traffic monitoring: Traffic inspection is supported for all three options for east-west and north-south directions. This means traffic is monitored from within a trusted boundary and moves outside the trust to possible malicious external networks and vice versa.
• Traffic alerts: Deny traffic and get alerts from known malicious IP addresses and domains to protect against possible attacks.
• Premium support: The premium option offers support for rapid detection of attacks by looking for specific patterns, such as byte sequences in network traffic or known malware instruction sequences.

Azure DDoS Protection

Azure DDoS Protection aims to mitigate and defend against distributed denial-of-service attacks. The goal of a DDoS attack is to shut down a network or service by overwhelming it with traffic. Azure DDoS Protection is automatically tuned and easy to enable on new or existing virtual networks. Two tiers are available, including DDoS Network protection, designed for virtual networks, and DDoS IP Protection, which offers additional features. DDoS Protection offers several benefits.           

• Simple configuration: It’s easy to configure, as all resources on a virtual network are immediately protected once DDoS Network Protection is enabled.
• Traffic monitoring in real time: With real-time traffic monitoring, you can look for indicators of attack and automatically mitigate detected issues.
• Powerful analytics: Analytics can be used for an organization’s investigation. Detailed reports, including a summary, are sent during and after an attack. Flow logs can also be sent to SIEM tools of your choice.

Azure Information Protection

Formerly Microsoft Information Protection, Azure Information Protection is part of Microsoft Purview, which helps organizations discover, classify, protect, and govern sensitive information. Benefits of Azure Information Protection include the following.

• Data Security: Know your data and identify what sensitive information exists within the organization to put protective measures in place.
• Sensitivity labels: Protect your data with sensitivity labels across apps, services, and devices as data traverses the organization internally and externally.
• File scanning: Scan on-premises file repositories to identify and label sensitive files to ensure they’re

Microsoft Defender for Identity

Formerly known as Azure Advanced Threat Protection, this cloud-based security solution integrates with Microsoft Defender XDR to help secure your identity monitoring. Gain insights on identity configurations with security best practices that make it difficult to compromise user credentials. Microsoft Defender for Identity offers several benefits.

• Analytics: Real-time analytics and data intelligence help detect possible threats.
• Automatic response: Set automated responses for compromised user credentials.
• Alert identification: Integration with Microsoft Defender XDR makes it easier to identify alerts and provides meaningful data to assist with investigating anomalous activity.

Azure Policy

Azure Policy helps organizations assess regulatory compliance, security, cost, consistency, and management of their Azure environment and enforce standards at scale. Policy definitions are in JSON format and can be customized for the environment. Azure provides common use case examples to help organizations get started with this tool. The tool provides multiple benefits.

• Defining parameters: Define parameters for policy definitions to evaluate resources and act for noncompliance.
• Effects: Respond to noncompliant resources through effects set in the policy rule. This can be as simple as blocking actions or denying a resource change.
• Resource remediation: Remediate noncompliant resources through remediation tasks that deploy via template or modify operations.

Azure Bastion

Azure Bastion is a fully managed PaaS service that’s hardened internally and provides connectivity to your virtual machines via RDP/SSH. Since you don’t need a public IP address when using Azure Bastion, you limit the risk of exposing your machines outside of the network and port scanning by malicious users.

• Private IP connection: Connection via private IP means you don’t need to configure/manage NSGs to connect to machines.
• Azure Portal Sessions: RDP and SSH sessions are in the Azure Portal.
• PaaS-based: Since it’s PaaS-based, you don’t need to manage a separate bastion host in a VM.

Azure Security Tool Integration

The tools mentioned above can help organizations strengthen their overall security posture and reduce vulnerability to cyber threats or noncompliance. Implementing Azure Defender as the first step offers “quick wins” regarding security enhancements. Next, you can introduce the other tools to help create a holistic security strategy. For example, Azure DDoS Protection can be enhanced with Veeam Data Platform to ensure data is recoverable in the event of an attack, while Azure Information Protection can benefit from Veeam’s advanced data resilience and immutability features.

Third-party security tools compatible with Microsoft Azure include Trend Micro, Cloud One, and Check Point CloudGuard. Using these with Azure security tools helps you follow the principle of defense in depth by providing multilayered defense against multiple threats. This security system proves challenging for any attacker, as they must overcome many defense mechanisms to penetrate the systems.

Leveling Up Your Azure Security With Veeam

Regardless of where the data lives, securing it and ensuring it’s available for business continuity is the responsibility of the organization and its users. Azure’s built-in features can help organizations of any size secure their important assets and meet regulatory compliance. However, gaps such as limited backup and recovery solutions, lack of advanced data resilience, and proactive threat assessment can be addressed by integrating Veeam Data Platform.

Opting for third-party tools and layering Azure security tools can provide organizations with a strong and flexible security framework. When it comes to data protection, Veeam Data Platform can help ensure your data is recoverable wherever and whenever you need it most, complementing tools like Azure Defender, Microsoft Entra ID Protection, and Microsoft Sentinel with comprehensive backup and recovery solutions and AI-powered ransomware defense.

Check out a demo or download a trial today.

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