Microsoft Defender for Cloud – Cloud Marathoner's Journey

What services you could use to apply Zero Trust 🚷 principles in your cloud environment ⁉ 🤔

Hello Cloud Marathoners!

We live in a rapidly evolving security landscape 🔐 🛡 with new challenges every day. Even after the pandemic, our work continues to be blended with remote work where many organizations enabled the BYOD policies to increase productivity of the people.

Growing landscape of cybersecurity attacks

Relaxed controls on IT assets, welcomed potential vulnerabilities, and attack surfaces are also expanded adding layers of complexity to corporate IT to perform their task to defend and enable organizational services.

Zero Trust model aligned services

Zero Trust model offered by leading industry players like Microsoft offers comprehensive solutions to our security challenges. Let’s consider those services and their benefits that are listed below:

✅ Security Posture Management
It is enhanced with Azure Policy and Azure Blueprints by defining and enforcing compliance and control guardrails on Azure resources

✅ Identities
Are strengthened using Entra ID (aka, Azure AD) providing robust authentication and authorization.

✅ Endpoint Management
Services like Microsoft Intune and Entra ID Join manage the corporate and BYOD devices with strict compliance

✅ Web App protection
Azure Defender for Cloud & Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects app services by using bleeding-edge security features

✅ Data security
Remains top priority in transit and rest with advanced security features of Azure Storage services by providing encrypted, reliable, and scalable solutions

✅ Infrastructure security
Secrets and certificates are protected with Azure Key Vault services and Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers comprehensive threat protection from day zero

✅ Network Security
Azure network services like Azure Firewall and Virtual Networks are ensuring traffic is secure and segmented

✅ Conditional Access & Controls
App and data access is guarded by Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Conditional Access services by enforcing specific access controls and providing visibility of your SaaS app landscape to help protect your apps.

✅ Modern SIEM and SOAR solution
The Azure Sentinel stands as a cloud-native solution that combines capabilities by centralizing threat detection and response.

In Summary

In summary, Microsoft Azure provides tools and services that are specifically designed to address growing concerns of vulnerabilities that your IT and Security team are tasked to deal with by following Zero Trust principles.

[🖐 Credit] Microsoft Zero Trust & Conditional Access docs

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Enabling protection of multi-cloud environments from one central?

Hello Cloud Marathoners,

Hybrid-cloud security and protection of digital estate across cloud is very hot topic. But there are very few tools that can cover all different clouds, even though there are myriad of third party and cloud native tools to achieve this mission.

Thus, I have compiled my takeaways on perspective from the latest Microsoft Security blog post and wanted to share back set of tools on Microsoft Azure that could help you achieve management of security poster across clouds.

Microsoft’s Azure security and management tools extend protection to your multi-cloud estate (including other CSPs like AWS, GCP, IBM, etc.)

The followings are the key services that enable it:

✔️ Azure defender for Servers
✔️ Azure Security Center
✔️ Azure Defender for SQL

Let’s start with the Azure Defender for Servers.
What is the Azure Defender for Servers ?

Well, this service leverages Azure Arc to simplify the on-boarding and security of virtual machines running in AWS, GCP, and hybrid clouds.

The Azure Arc projects non-Azure resources into Azure native objects that can be managed and secured with Azure capabilities (Secure Score, Compliance Reporting, Azure Policy, Azure Defender, asset management, etc.)

Next important service visualized on a diagram is Azure Security Center.
Well, what is Azure Security Center?

This service provides a unified multi-cloud view of security posture by integrating AWS Security Hub and GCP Security Command Center detected misconfigurations and findings in Secure Score and Regulatory Compliance Experience.

And finally, let’s review the Azure Defender for SQL.

This managed service constantly monitors your SQL servers for threats, whether they are hosted on-premises, in multi-cloud deployments on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and in virtual machines on Azure.

Looking for more references?

Check out a “Protecting multi-cloud environments with Azure Security Center” blog post on Microsoft blog post.

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Study Guide for Azure Security Technologies (AZ-500)

Hello friends,

Updates: This exam had a number of changes from the mid 2020 till now. I have updated exam objectives and some of the listed references to be up-t0-date..

I am back with a new study guide AZ-500: Azure Security Technologies Associate.

This is a very important exam for anyone who puts security at the core of a solution – deployed into Azure Cloud environment. In this respect, it is invaluable for any professional whose responsibilities include: maintaining the security posture, identifying, and remediating vulnerabilities by using a variety of security tools, implementing threat protection, and responding to security incident escalations.

By the way, you could also check out the following study guides, if interested 👌👍

By learning this topic, you as a candidate will gain strong skills in scripting and automation; a deep understanding of networking, virtualization, and cloud N-tier architecture. Your strong familiarity with cloud capabilities and products and services for Azure is very critical to succeed.

Getting AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Associate

In this section, you will get to know the official exam objectives, free Microsoft Learn materials and additional materials that I have used. On a high level, the skills that are measured in this exam are:

Actually, you could find this information on the official Microsoft exam website.

Useful resources that helped me along the way:

Here are the references which will serve you a way for successful digestion of the security materials. I would like to thank Pete Zerger – a Microsoft MVP & Cybersecurity Strategist for his informative content & professional support. He has really valuable posts and training courses on the LinkedIn platform.

Security Engineer learning path from Microsoft Learn
Become an Azure Security Engineer learning path LinkedIn Learning
Microsoft Azure Security Engineer path Pluralsight videos
Microsoft Docs for all to dig into the documentation questions 🙂
Starting points in DevSecOps journey

There were many breaks in my study where I paused to search for Azure Security documentation on Microsoft Docs. However, discovering the GitHub repo from AzureMentor highly helped me to save some time, while getting familiar with exam objectives.

Thus, the @AzureMentor GitHub pages on Azure-AZ-500-Study-Guide have direct links into each high level objective as well as outlined items within it.

I would like to thank my family and kids for providing me with the opportunity to complete my journey. Big thanks to close friends and #linkedinfaily for continued support.

That’s all friends! Hope this sharing will encourage you to start your own cloud journey.

And as always, feel free to get connected and leave your comment(s). The whole LinkedIn family will benefit from your suggestions and feedback.