During their Q2 earnings call this past January, Microsoft shared that the amount of Azure compute usage has more than doubled in the past year, helping drive continued growth in their Intelligent Cloud business. In a separate announcement earlier in the month, Microsoft shared they were restructuring their partner program to help foster more growth for Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners. In the past six months, we at Alert Logic have seen increased interest in the market for security solutions to protect workloads on Azure, and it’s likely this trend will continue given the investments Microsoft is making in the platform and partner ecosystem.
If you are looking to find out more about protecting workloads in Azure, there are several resources from Microsoft that we recommend checking out:
- Overview on how customers and Microsoft share responsibility for workloads running on the Microsoft Cloud: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/azuresecurity/2016/04/18/what-does-shared-responsibility-in-the-cloud-mean/
- This blog explains the approach to Azure cloud security vs. security for on-premises environments.
- Read this White Paper from Alert Logic as it describes the background and structure for the shared security responsibility model in the Azure cloud.
- Microsoft has several recommendations and best practice design patterns for many of their cloud services: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/security-best-practices-and-patterns
- The list of cloud services best practices from Microsoft is ever-growing. This blog goes into the details of the framework included by Microsoft in each best practice.
- Speaking of Best Practices, view this Best Practices webinar from Alert Logic: Architecting Security for Microsoft Azure VMs.
- Free foundational training resources at Microsoft’s OpenEdX site: https://openedx.microsoft.com/ and you can find the latest information on newly launched services on Channel 9: https://channel9.msdn.com/
- Create a Microsoft learning account and get access to free online Azure courses on topics ranging from “Azure Fundamentals” to “Azure Security and Compliance” and much more.
- Microsoft’s Cyber Defense Operations Center outlines some of the best practices they use to protect their customer and corporate assets: http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/01/17/microsofts-cyber-defense-operations-center-shares-best-practices/
- Protect, Detect and Respond are the key pillars of the Microsoft Cyber Defense strategy and this site goes into details on the tactics for each of these pillars.
- Downloading the Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center strategy brief provides some excellent guidelines and interesting insights such as “82% of all companies globally expect to face a cyberattack in 2017.”
If this is your first deployment in the cloud, or if you are planning architecture that spans hybrid or multiple cloud platforms, we can help you work through the security considerations to protect your migration or new application deployment. Please join us on February 15 for an interactive webinar to learn and ask questions about best practices for securing applications running on Azure.
