Maximizing Cloud Security with Azure Security Center

Cyber attacks are on the rise as the threat landscape expands every day. Remote work on various devices outside of official networks have unknown security levels and poses higher security risks. Microsoft Azure Security Center solidifies enterprise security management across hybrid cloud workloads. It includes Virus Threat Protection in data centers throughout on-premises and cloud workloads. 

What Is Azure Security Center? 

Azure Security Center is a unified platform that secures and manages fast-changing workloads. It also handles the challenges of securing your hybrid cloud workloads. 

Securing the network ecosystem and services is essential when shifting to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Unlike Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where the cloud provider takes a fair share of most network security tasks, you need to take more responsibility as a cloud customer. 

How can Azure Security Center help your organization? 

Azure Security Center protects an organization’s IT infrastructure in the following ways: 

• View security statuses: Assesses your environment and provides a clear view of your resources' security and statuses, highlighting risks. 

• Alerts & Recommendations: Provides threat prevention recommendations and generates security alerts. It detects security rule violations by monitoring workloads. 

• Automatic service provisions: Security Center is a native part of Azure and provisions services automatically. It makes it convenient to deploy within your Azure-powered environments. 

• Better Security control: Using Azure Security Center, organizations can better control the security of an increasing number of services subject to growing threats. 

How does Azure Security Center Work? 

Azure Security Center continuously discovers new resources getting deployed across various workloads. It also assesses if configurations are as per the best security practices. 

In case of abnormal behavior detection, the Azure Security Center flags resources prioritizes activities, and gives a list of recommendations powered by the Azure Security Benchmark (An azure-specific set of guidelines for security and compliance). 

Azure Security Center groups recommendations into security controls with a secure score that helps the security team prioritize the items. 

Security Center monitors and protects Azure PaaS services such as SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, Service Fabric, and your storage accounts natively. 

Key features 

Security Alerts and Recommendations 

The security center also protects Linux servers or other non-Azure windows that run services irrespective of whether it is on-premises or on the cloud. Security Center installs log analytics agents on all virtual and physical machines, thereby auto-protecting virtual machines in the environment.  

After analyzing and processing events from Azure and deployed agents, the security center delivers custom recommendations on securing workloads best.  

Proactive and real-time security alerts help IT security teams to review, assess and take prompt action to prevent penetration by any malicious code. 

Security Policies 

Azure Security Center makes network security robust with security alerts and recommendations. Security teams can look and act in the right direction on servers, end-points, data services, and business applications across your entire IT landscape. 

The Azure security center can efficiently manage subscriptions in an organization by identifying and labeling any shadow IT subscriptions that may get detected. The security team can then take necessary actions to ensure adherence to the organization's policies and compliance. 

Onboarding New Resources 

Running dynamic workloads includes the deployment of new resources in most organizations. The Azure security center has automated resource discovery that enables compliance checks, and adherence to security best practices as deployments occur for new resources. The outcome is a recommendation list on issues that need fixing and other actions to protect your digital assets. 

Network Maps 

Azure Security Center creates a network map for an organization's network and provides a complete picture of the network connections.  

You can view your organization's workloads' topology and see any weak points. One can check if each node has the required configurations for maximum security. 

Proactively Maximize Threat Protection by integrating Microsoft Defender. 

Azure Security Center can identify and prevent threats at the IaaS layer and PaaS in Azure. The Azure Security Center has features that can help security teams investigate the origination of an attack, how it spreads across the network, and the resulting impacts on resources. 

It natively integrates with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection and automatically protects Windows and Linux machines on the network. 

One can automate application control policies on server environments to gain adaptive application control policies. It provides advantages of end-to-end app approval listing across the Windows servers. The entire process is automated, so one need not create rules and check for violations. 

A summary of Azure Security Center's Core Features 

• Unified security management across various platforms (on-premises and across different Azure and non-Azure clouds) 

• Comprehensive threat detection for Azure services, virtual machines, networks, and servers. 

• Application controls are adaptive and automated.  

• Centralized security policy management that complies with regulatory frameworks and internal policies. 

• Prioritization of security recommendations and alerts for immediate actions for the most critical vulnerabilities. 

• Continuous security assessment for machines, data services, networks, storage, and applications running across organizations' environments. 

Azure Secure Center is suitable for small, medium, and large organizations. The unified security control and security management center delivers continuous recommendations about security vulnerabilities and security best practices across your networked resources and cloud workloads. 

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