Rapidly changing workloads bring both advantages and challenges. On one hand, users can create proofs of concepts, solutions, and projects faster than ever. On the other hand, quickly built solutions may not always adhere to an organization’s security standards or best practices, potentially opening the door to threats such as data breaches or unauthorized access. Azure provides built-in resources for enhanced security management, offering users crucial visibility into the state of their infrastructure, particularly in relation to misconfigurations or security issues. These resources can also be integrated, working together to bring additional benefits to the organization.
Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center aids in protecting your resources, detecting, and responding to threats, thereby increasing visibility and control over the security of your Azure resources. It provides integrated security monitoring and policy management across your subscriptions, aiding in the detection of potential threats that might go unnoticed within a vast ecosystem of security solutions.
Azure Security Center introduces proactive security features such as providing recommendations based on the configuration of your resources. For example, it might advise on encryption methods, network security best practices, or firewall configurations. This tool can help you address misconfigurations and harden your attack surface against threats. Furthermore, it outlines remediation steps, providing you with the necessary visibility into your cloud security posture.
Azure Sentinel
Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution that provides intelligent security analytics across your entire Azure tenant. It ingests alerts from various sources and uses features like fusion analytics to correlate alerts and data across a broad range of sources, creating incidents or events. This allows you to understand the scope and impact of a given event more comprehensively.
After connecting your data from numerous sources, Azure Sentinel sifts through all the logs to highlight incidents your team should focus on.
Azure Sentinel’s responses to detected incidents can be automated using Playbooks. The variety of connectors for the Logic App is enormous, offering a wide collection of actions. For instance, you can create an automation that uses the Microsoft Teams connector to post a message in a specific channel after detecting an incident. Similarly, if you want to create a Jira ticket, the Jira connector will be of use.
The above example merely scratches the surface of the possibilities. Other connectors include triggering Azure functions, managing Asana workspaces, using Adobe PDF Services for PDF conversions, utilizing the Computer Vision API, editing online Excel spreadsheets, and much more.
Using Security Center and Sentinel together
By integrating these two services, you establish an end-to-end detection, investigation, and response platform, thereby fortifying the security of your cloud workloads. With Azure Security Center, you obtain visibility into your cloud environment, allowing you to address recommendations that help harden your attack surface. When combined with Azure Sentinel, you can detect, correlate incidents, and act on them in an automated way.
Consider the case of a potential data breach: Azure Security Center might detect unusual data access patterns and raise an alert. Azure Sentinel could then correlate this alert with other anomalous activities across your system, creating an incident. Then, automated responses — like notifying the security team or temporarily locking certain accounts — can be triggered. This seamless integration allows you to spend less time setting up a SIEM solution and more time focusing on hardening your cloud platform, automating responses, and addressing real issues.
