Book Image

Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Certification and Beyond

By : David Okeyode
Book Image

Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Certification and Beyond

By: David Okeyode

Overview of this book

Exam preparation for the AZ-500 means you’ll need to master all aspects of the Azure cloud platform and know how to implement them. With the help of this book, you'll gain both the knowledge and the practical skills to significantly reduce the attack surface of your Azure workloads and protect your organization from constantly evolving threats to public cloud environments like Azure. While exam preparation is one of its focuses, this book isn't just a comprehensive security guide for those looking to take the Azure Security Engineer certification exam, but also a valuable resource for those interested in securing their Azure infrastructure and keeping up with the latest updates. Complete with hands-on tutorials, projects, and self-assessment questions, this easy-to-follow guide builds a solid foundation of Azure security. You’ll not only learn about security technologies in Azure but also be able to configure and manage them. Moreover, you’ll develop a clear understanding of how to identify different attack vectors and mitigate risks. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with implementing multi-layered security to protect identities, networks, hosts, containers, databases, and storage in Azure – and more than ready to tackle the AZ-500.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Implement Identity and Access Security for Azure
7
Section 2: Implement Azure Platform Protection
12
Section 3: Secure Storage, Applications, and Data

Encrypting VM disks with Azure Disk Encryption

VM disks are encrypted at rest in Azure data centers. While this will protect against data theft if someone breaks into one of the Microsoft data centers and steals a bunch of disks (an unlikely scenario), it will not prevent an attacker or a malicious insider with the right credentials from taking a snapshot of a VM disk, and then mounting it on another system to access its data (a more likely scenario). The recommendation to prevent this likely scenario is to enable volume-level encryption, and the easiest way to implement this is to utilize a feature called Azure Disk Encryption (ADE).

ADE leverages built-in OS encryption capabilities to provide volume-level encryption for your OS and its data disks. For Windows VMs in Azure, ADE uses the built-in BitLocker feature. For Linux VMs in Azure, ADE uses the DM-Crypt feature. To store the encryption secrets and keys, ADE uses Azure Key Vault (which we will cover in Chapter 12, Implementing...