As cloud computing continues to grow, cloud service providers are offering bigger incentives to developers to gravitate their own product. This is where things became more dynamic in the cloud.
Windows Azure offers a significantly more user-friendly infrastructure for companies utilizing the cloud. The concept has been growing and making its own place in the business arena, offering companies with an effective yet affordable solution for successfully carrying out business in an internet-dependent market.
Azure is comprised of a datacenter infrastructure operating globally and supporting tens of thousands of online services and businesses to provide high-level of secure facilities. The infrastructure ensures the application is close to the user without risking data leakage, as well as offering resiliency options and comprehensive compliance for customers. Currently, Azure is covering 140 countries and is serving 52 regions worldwide.
The regions are categorized based on their specific geographies. This ensures that the data sovereignty, residency, resiliency, and compliance requirements are honored based on their geographical boundaries.
In short, Microsoft Azure is more than just a cloud servicing with Windows. To fully understand Azure and learn how it ensures infrastructure security and compliance, Azure training is recommended. To implement this within your business model, establishing Azure certification as an essential requirement makes complete sense.
Microsoft Azure and Infrastructure Security
Business today are in a constant struggle of recruiting security experts to maintain a reliable and secure infrastructure. To stay on top of the security landscape game, Azure helps protect business infrastructure and helps reduce complexity and lower their cost.
Azure is a popular choice for large companies as their trusted cloud, mainly for the platform security it offers. Microsoft continues to improve the security it offers - even through the Azure platform - and invests billions of dollars into this idea every year to ensure your business assets and data can be protected.
Other than the physical security, aspects such as firmware, network infrastructure, and hardware are also continuously monitored and tested by Azure to ensure infrastructure security.
Secure Firmware and Hardware
Reliable security controls are integrated into the system through both hardware and firmware of Azure to ensure utmost security, which tends to continue for a lifetime.
Cerberus, a recent project by Microsoft, is a microcontroller, memory, a CPU chip, and programmable output/input system, that protect the system against malicious updates and unauthorized access. It also helps secure the runtime integrity, boot-time, and pre-boot of the firmware.
Azure monitors firmware and hardware security to ensure that any risk or threats that are identified are mitigated before it can attack your business.
Azure can encrypt current data in use, data at rest, as well as data in transit. It is the first cloud-computing platform that supports both hardware and software-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
Network Infrastructure Security
Implementing the cloud enables you to cut down on infrastructure cost while scaling resources at the same time. Even with a shared network, Microsoft has implemented several mechanisms to ensure that the customer's network, as well as Azure's network, remain secure and segregated.
Customer and management networks are kept separated in Azure to secure the traffic movement and to improve performance. Microsoft is responsible for managing networks while administrators and devices are connected to Azure. Controls such as privileged access and just-in-time access can be used for administrators to access the device. This keeps all the unauthorized access limited. Other than that, system integration for network monitoring, network cabling, and the equipment to secure and support the network are also taken care of by Microsoft itself.
Monitoring and Testing
You can enjoy peaceful sleep every night knowing that more than 3500 Microsoft cybersecurity experts are working for you around the clock, 365 days a year!
Out of these individuals, more than 200 experts only monitor and identify potential vulnerabilities through blue and red team exercises. While the red team makes an effort to compromise the infrastructure of Azure, the blue team continues to defend against these attacks.
Once the exercise is over, the teams codify lessons that they learned during the operating security process of Azure. This makes the teams more responsive, alert, and effective.
Also, since your infrastructure is in the secure hands of the Microsoft cybersecurity experts, you can utilize your available resources for other business operations.
Compliance
Azure's infrastructure is managed and designed to meet a wide array of industry-specific and international compliance standards - including SOC 1, SOC 2, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. Not only this, but Microsoft Azure is also programmed to meet standards specified to countries such as Singapore MTCS, UK G-Cloud, and Australia IRAP.
Regular third-party audits are carried out to ensure strict security controls are followed as a standard mandate. Businesses can access the compliance offerings to access the complete list of compliance standards followed by Microsoft Azure.
Bottom Line
The scale of investment around the hardware, infrastructure, and experts of Microsoft remains unparalleled. It's totally worth it to rely on the secure infrastructure Microsoft provides for our segregated networks, datacenters, and well-maintained firmware and hardware.
Adopting Azure can help any business to improve its operational security processes to save resources and utilize them for delivering better business value.