Bits & Bytes

The BitTitan Blog for Service Providers

08/08/2018
Howard M Cohen
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Azure Security: 5 Planning Tips for New Environments

This is the third installment in a new series on the BitTitan blog, “The Complete MSP,” built to help IT professionals stay ahead of the Azure curve and accelerate the evolution of your customers’ solutions.  In previous posts, we covered the growing professional and managed services opportunity around Azure (“Blue Gold: The Azure Gold Rush and How to Cash In”) as well as best practices for transitioning your customers to Microsoft’s cloud platform (“You Can Get There From Here – If You Do So Gradually”).

 

To Assure Success, Assess!

When planning a new Azure environment, where does security fit in?

If you’re approaching this from the 7-layer ISO/Open Systems Interconnect model perspective, just draw a circle around the entire stack. For a more vivid image, imagine you’re building a house and you have to paint every brick with security paint before you lay it. Each and every brick. Some more, some less, but they all get security painted on them.

The first thing you’ll need to do, as you always have, is to assess the environment you’re transitioning to Azure. Here are five areas of focus to keep in mind.

 

Data

In the end, it’s all about the data, so you need to assess each data asset separately. How much is each asset worth? You don’t want to end up spending more to protect certain workloads than they are actually worth. This is how you determine how much paint each brick gets. Additionally, consider where the data will be used most. From a design standpoint, you want to put the data as close to the operation as you can. Also remember to allow for scalability. In your on-prem world, the expansion of data storage resources requires a major installation event during which adjustments will be made manually. In the cloud, most everything is elastic, so your environment needs to anticipate that capacities will fluctuate upward and downward frequently.

 

Policies

Since you’ll be creating policies for each subscription and each resource group you use, it’s vital that you map this out carefully, observing each of the security recommendations related to the Azure Security Center. You’ll also want to develop policies for each user, each user group, and each device type that will be accessing Azure resources. You’ll soon realize that people are the most unpredictable and therefore the most difficult segment of your network to manage, a conclusion also supported in a recent cloud migration report from BitTitan and Osterman research. You’ll be able to use the Microsoft Monitoring Agent to collect security information about each of your virtual machines. Be sure to organize your workspaces and resource groups to take maximum advantage of the data to be found in those logs.

 

Procedures

Develop a plan and clear owners in anticipation of anomalies in your infrastructure or situations that require swift and transparent responses. Who will be notified? How will they be notified? How will the actioning of each notification be recorded and closed when done? What constitutes a Level 1, 2, or 3 priority alert? What are your service level agreements (SLA) for response and resolution at each level? How will events be escalated if necessary? Oftentimes it’s the response to the situation, not the situation itself, that determines the full extent of the damage.

 

People

Azure uses Role-Based Access Control, which has built-in roles which can be assigned to users, groups, and services in Azure. The size of your organization may or may not make it impractical to establish specific access rights and resource accessibility for each individual user. Groups make it far easier to scale. When using the Azure Security Center, each user or group may be designated as an Owner, a Contributor, or just a Reader.

Persistence

Absolutely nothing about security is “set-it-and-forget-it.” The Azure Security Center provides the ability to constantly monitor the health of your security. Diligence and vigilance are the watchwords of effective monitoring and management. A discipline of constant monitoring and adjusting to events as they happen assures that your security measures are always fully responding to the constantly changing state of the threat environment. This must be taken seriously.

 

Azure Connects to Your World

Azure-LOGO-300x224.pngRemember also that Azure is a resource that exists in the larger context of your overall IT environment. The same diligence must be applied to the rest of your computing world. Are your endpoint devices properly and sufficiently secured? Are your network connections properly protected? Are you encrypting all data at all times whether in transit or at rest?

The most dangerous assumption to make is that Azure will provide all the security protections you require. Ultimately, you are responsible for the privacy and security of the data. You must carefully evaluate and approve all service providers along the path, including Microsoft. Talk to anyone who has ever experienced a major data breach and they’ll tell you that the diligence you invest into your planning is one of the best investments you’ll ever make.

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