Microsoft Azure and other cloud systems like it can save money, and time, and improve performance. However, moving to the cloud entails tremendous risk. A recent survey found that 81% of organizations agreed that cloud security was a key difficulty, with 75% adding that governance, lack of resources, and compliance were also a concern.
As a result, before moving to a public cloud platform like Azure, it’s critical that your organization’s security plan be reviewed and updated. A cloud security risk assessment should be one of the first steps you do during this approach.
As a result, you may avoid potential disputes and gain greater control over your most valuable assets by implementing this strategy. As a result of this, you may provide a safe and compliant framework for expanding your cloud footprint.
For more information on securing your public cloud footprint with an Azure cloud security assessment, keep reading.
Azure Cloud Security Assessment
The term implies that an Azure cloud security audit entails testing your cloud infrastructure to discover data and identify risks, as well as their potential impact and likelihood of occurring. This is done to discover data and identify hazards.
Cloud security exams are not limited to Azure, and as a best practice, you should conduct frequent security audits across all your platforms.
Azure cloud security assessments
To better understand how to fortify your cloud footprint, it can be helpful to categorize your Azure security evaluations into distinct areas. The four primary categories are visibility, identity, data, and compliance – all of which we’ll go over in greater detail in this section of the article.
The assessment of visibility
In an ideal scenario, you would have complete visibility throughout your whole Azure ecosystem. Businesses frequently find themselves in problems because they are unable to maintain track of their assets. Once you lose access to your data, it becomes impossible to keep it safe and secure.
A visibility assessment aids you in gaining a more transparent view of your cloud resources and their utilization patterns. With complete visibility, it becomes significantly more straightforward to identify and mitigate risk. During a visibility evaluation, the goal is to inventory all person and non-person identities, data, compute resources, and policies that are currently running in your cloud. This is accomplished through a variety of methods.
Keep in mind that cloud computing platforms are constantly evolving. As a result, having a solution that provides real-time monitoring and updates through a centralized dashboard is essential.
The assessment of identity
In the public cloud, the most common attack vectors are both person and non-person identities. Unfortunately, most businesses are failing to protect them. As predicted by Gartner, by 2023, the incorrect management of user identities, access, and privileges would be responsible for 75% of cloud security failures.
Regular inspections can assist you in avoiding identity theft and other hazards. At the end of this process, security teams should map and monitor each and every trust connection and inherited permission, as well as every policy across all organizational entities.
You should conduct a thorough analysis of your environment to detect privilege escalation issues such as excessive permissions, as well as the risks associated with separation of duties among roles, compute instances, and accounts. After completing the course, you should have a much better understanding of hazardous pairings, latent identities, and responsibilities.
Risk assessment for the use of data
All data stored in a public cloud is at risk of being compromised. While conducting a data risk assessment, security teams examine all data storage locations as well as access rights for anybody or anything who may have access to your information.
Also important is a thorough analysis of structured and unstructured data storage to uncover crown gem data or information that is extremely sensitive. With the results of this evaluation, you can work toward the establishment of the least privilege access policy and the better management of data migration throughout your organization.
Evaluation of the configuration
Data and identities can change throughout the course of a lifetime. For example, data can be moved between several storage places. Person and non-person identities might potentially inherit differing permissions, increasing the risk and exposure associated with the identity in question.
So, to maintain compliance, your team should undertake routine configuration assessments for all data and identities on a regular basis. By doing so, you may create a security baseline that is updated on a regular basis and have the capacity to discover and correct issues such as cloud misconfigurations and drift as soon as they occur.
Managex simplifies cloud security audits
In most businesses, especially in large, fast-moving organizations with scattered settings, security teams do not have the time or resources to manually conduct security assessments on a regular basis.
The use of a dedicated cloud security platform, such as Managex, is the most efficient method of streamlining cloud security assessments. Managex enables you to provide continuous security monitoring across all of your cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform, using a single platform. Managex provides continual security and vulnerability evaluations that cover all identities, resources, services, storage, and networks. These exams are performed on a continuous basis. All-in-one product that addresses CIEM, CSPM, Cloud DLP, and Automation requirements.
If your company is considering implementing Azure, it would be wise to observe Managex in operation.
