Book Image

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification and Beyond

By : Steve Miles
Book Image

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification and Beyond

By: Steve Miles

Overview of this book

This is the digital and cloud era, and Microsoft Azure is one of the top cloud computing platforms. It’s now more important than ever to understand how the cloud functions and the different services that can be leveraged across the cloud. This book will give you a solid understanding of cloud concepts and Microsoft Azure, starting by taking you through cloud concepts in depth, then focusing on the core Azure architectural components, solutions, and management tools. Next, you will understand security concepts, defense-in-depth, and key security services such as Network Security Groups and Azure Firewall, as well as security operations tooling such as Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel. As you progress, you will understand how identity, governance, privacy, and compliance are managed in Azure. Finally, you will get to grips with cost management, service-level agreements, and service life cycles. Throughout, the book features a number of hands-on exercises to support the concepts, services, and solutions discussed. This provides you with a glimpse of real-world scenarios, before finally concluding with practice questions for AZ-900 exam preparation. By the end of this Azure book, you will have a thorough understanding of cloud concepts and Azure fundamentals, enabling you to pass the AZ-900 certification exam easily.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Cloud Concepts
4
Section 2: Core Azure Services
7
Section 3: Core Solutions and Management Tools
10
Section 4: Security
12
Section 5: Identity, Governance, Privacy, and Compliance
16
Section 6: Cost Management and Service-Level Agreements

MFA and Conditional Access

MFA (which includes Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) provides an additional layer of security for identifying a user by requiring the user to submit two or more elements for authentication. MFA is based on the following principles:

  • Knowledge: Something that only the user knows, such as a password or pin.
  • Possession: Something that only the user has, such as a code sent to a phone, a token, or a key.
  • Inherent: Something that only the user is, such as biometrics.

Conditional Access works alongside MFA to provide more granular levels of access control; information is collected from the sign-in process (signals), and then decisions are made upon that information to determine whether access to the requested resource will be granted or denied and whether the user will require additional factors of authentication or require taking other action, such as resetting their password. This is visualized in the following diagram:

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