When you have your Hybrid Cloud Enterprise Design ready in a Microsoft HUB-Spoke model and your Security in place, you can do your optimize on your Azure workloads and keep up-to-date for your compliancy. Microsoft Azure Security Center can support you in Security and Compliancy (GDPR). Here you see my former blogposts about Microsoft Azure HUB-Spoke model architecture and Security by design :
Security in software is always on the move and changing in this world, when you think you are ready something has changed already. That’s why I love Microsoft Azure Security Center to keep you posted and giving you advise on Security but also on Compliancy.
From here you see a high-level overview of these new possibilities in Microsoft Azure Security Center :
Security Center Overview
Microsoft Azure Security Center is working with the following navigation menu’s on the left :
General
Policy & Compliance
Resource Security Hygiene
Advanced Cloud Defense
Threat Protection
Automation & Orchestration
Microsoft Azure Secure Score Dashboard
Microsoft Azure Security Center is working with Overall Secure Score. In my Test LAB we have some work to do 😉
The Azure secure score reviews your security recommendations and prioritizes them for you, so you know which recommendations to perform first. This helps you find the most serious security vulnerabilities so you can prioritize investigation. Secure score is a tool that helps you assess your workload security posture. Improve your secure score in Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center Recommendations
Microsoft Azure Security Center gives you advise to make your Security Score higher and you can improve immediately.
Open Subnet without NSG.
From here you can Enable a Network Security Group (NSG) on the Subnet and make your network more secure.
Creating NSG from Azure Security Center.
A subnet with NSG.
Azure Security Center Advise on Disk Encryption
Description on Applying Disk Encryption on your Virtual Machines
General Information, with Impact and Implementation Cost.
Threats, what can happen when you don’t implement the security.
Security is a on-going process 24 hours -365 days to monitor, analyze, and prevent security issues. Working on Compliancy for your Business and making your own Security policies is important. Microsoft Azure Security Center can support you in this journey. When you Optimize your Azure workloads or make new solutions in Azure, keep it secure with Microsoft Azure Security Center.
Security and compliance–basic elements of the trusted cloud–are top priorities for organizations today. This paper is designed to help customers ensure that their data is handled in a manner that meets their data protection, regulatory, and sovereignty requirements on the global cloud architecture of Microsoft Azure. Transparency and control are also essential to establishing and maintaining trust in cloud technology. Microsoft recognizes that restricted and regulated industries require additional details for their risk management and to ensure compliance at all times. Microsoft provides an industry-leading security and compliance portfolio. Security is built into the Azure platform, beginning with the development process, which is conducted in accordance with the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), and includes technologies, controls and tools that address data management and governance, Active Directory identity and access controls, network and infrastructure security technologies and tools, threat protection, and encryption to protect data in transit and at rest. Microsoft also provides customers with choices to select and limit the types and locations of data storage on Azure. With the innovation of the security and compliance frameworks, customers in regulated industries can successfully run mission-critical workloads in the cloud and leverage all the advantages of the Microsoft hyperscale cloud. This simple approach can assist customers in meeting the data protection requirements of government regulations or company policies by helping them to:
Understand data protection obligations.
Understand the services and controls that Azure provides to help its customers meet those obligations.
Understand the evidence that customers need to assert compliance.
The paper is structured into these three sections, with each diving deeper into the security and technologies that help Microsoft customers to meet data protection requirements. The final section discusses specific requirements to which industries and organizations in selected European markets are subject.
Azure Monitor for VMs monitors your Azure virtual machines (VM) and virtual machine scale sets at scale. The service analyzes the performance and health of your Windows and Linux VMs, monitoring their processes and their dependencies on other resources and external processes.
As a solution, Azure Monitor for VMs includes support for monitoring performance and application dependencies for VMs that are hosted on-premises or in another cloud provider. Three key features deliver in-depth insight:
Logical components of Azure VMs that run Windows and Linux: Are measured against pre-configured health criteria, and they alert you when the evaluated condition is met.
Pre-defined, trending performance charts: Display core performance metrics from the guest VM operating system.
Dependency map: Displays the interconnected components with the VM from various resource groups and subscriptions.
The features are organized into three perspectives:
Health
Performance
Map
Here we have a look at Azure Monitor Service map of my local machine :
Here in the Event you see two Configuration Changes.
What is awesome to see, when you double click on the link marked with a arrow, then It will start log analytics with the right query to see what those changes are 🙂
You see some Changes in Windows Services and Updates on my local Machine
Communications of the local machine on-premisses
Workbooks combine text, Analytics queries, Azure Metrics, and parameters into rich interactive reports. Workbooks are editable by any other team members who have access to the same Azure resources.
First of all Thank you for following me and Sharing Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter Management content on Social Media 🙂 Sharing & Learning Together is Better.
Welcome 577 New Followers on Twitter of the 5904 Followers 🙂
More then 2.807.000 Tweet impressions in One year !
Started with Friday is MVPbuzz Day for Education to get Azure Cloud in the Classroom, working together with Teachers and Students in my Free time.
Working with Microsoft Learn in Teams for the Students.
Meetings and Speaking for Education, all about Azure and AzureStack Technologies.
Conferences, like the Global MVP Summit 2018, DevOps Amsterdam, Community Group meetings.
Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Build, Microsoft Connect events.
Almost every week Microsoft Product Group Intervention (PGI) sessions Online.
Sharing the News every Day via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft Tech Community, Blog
But what is coming in 2019 ?
Rocking with Azure in the Classroom !
I will continue every day sharing knowledge with the Community and continue my Free work on MVPbuzz Friday for Education to get Azure Cloud Technology in the Classroom for Teachers and Students.
The trend I see for 2019 is more Infrastructure and Security by Code with Microsoft Azure DevOps
and of course you have to be in Control with Microsoft Azure Monitor
I will write a blogpost in January 2019 about Microsoft Azure Hub-Spoke model by Enterprise Design 4 of 4: Optimize your Azure Workload.
More Items in 2019 to come :
Microsoft Azure Security Center for Hybrid IT
Windows Server 2019 in combination with Azure Cloud Services.
More on Containers in the Cloud
Azure Stack and ASDK
Integration with Azure Cloud.
API Management
Azure DevOps Pipelines and Collabration
Azure IoT for Smart Cities and Buildings combined with AI Technology
2019 will be a Great year again with New Microsoft Technologies and Features for your business.
Azure DevOps Services is a cloud service for collaborating on code development. It provides an integrated set of features that you access through your web browser or IDE client. The features are included, as follows:
Git repositories for source control of your code
Build and release services to support continuous integration and delivery of your apps
Agile tools to support planning and tracking your work, code defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum methods
Many tools to test your apps, including manual/exploratory testing, load testing, and continuous testing
Highly customizable dashboards for sharing progress and trends
Built-in wiki for sharing information with your team
The Azure DevOps ecosystem also provides support for adding extensions and integrating with other popular services, such as: Campfire, Slack, Trello, UserVoice, and more, and developing your own custom extensions.
Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to either Azure Container Instances or managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Monitoring your containers is critical, especially when you’re running a production cluster, at scale, with multiple applications.
Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Container logs are also collected. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, these metrics and logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux and stored in your Log Analytics workspace.
What I really like is that you now can see the Container Live logs from the Azure portal and see what is going on in the background of a Container 🙂
Activate Azure Kubernetes Container Live Logs
Here you see the Container Live logs
This feature provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:
AKS without Kubernetes RBAC authorization enabled
AKS enabled with Kubernetes RBAC authorization
AKS enabled with Azure Active Directory (AD) SAML based single-sign on
You even can search in the Container Live Logs for Troubleshooting and history :
Search on ssh
Azure Monitor for containers uses a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux. After initial deployment, there are routine or optional tasks you may need to perform during its lifecycle.
Because of this agent you can work with Log Analytics in Azure Monitor :
When you have your production workload running on Azure Kubernetes Clusters, It’s important to monitor to keep you in Control of the solution in Microsoft Azure and watch for improvements like performance for the business. With Container Live logs you can see what is going on in the Containers when you have issues and that’s great for troubleshooting to get your problem solved fast. Get your workload into Azure Containers and make your Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines in the Cloud.
When you are implementing your Microsoft Azure Design like a HUB-Spoke model you have to deal with security of your Azure environment (Virtual Datacenter). One of them are Network Security Groups to protect your Virtual networks and make communication between Azure subnets possible in a Secure Azure Virtual Datacenter.
You really have to plan your Azure Virtual networks and implement it by Architectural Design. Now I’m writing about Azure Network Security Groups which is important, but there are more items to deal with like :
Naming Conventions in your Azure Virtual Datacenter
Azure Subscriptions ( who is Owner, Contributor, or Reader? )
Azure Regions ( Where is my Datacenter in the world? )
Azure VNET and Sub-Nets ( IP-addresses )
Security of your Virtual Networks ( Traffic filtering, Routing )
How to Manage Microsoft Azure Network Security Groups (NSG) ?
IMPORTANT: Before you start with Azure Network Security Groups, test every ARM JSON Script first in your Dev-Test Azure Subscription before you do production. Talk with your Cloud Administrators, because when you implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and work with ARM Templates you can delete manual settings in NSG’s for example, which will give you troubles like no protocol communication between subnets.
When you start new in Microsoft Azure, It’s easy to make your Azure security baseline for all of your Network Security Groups (NSG’s) by Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.
When you have a Microsoft Azure HUB-Spoke model with for example four Azure Subscriptions and a lot of Azure Virtual Networks – Subnets, you got a lot of NSG’s to manage and you don’t want to manage those manually. So there are different ways to manage Azure Network Security Groups via ARM Templates. For example :
ARM Templates from the Azure Portal
Make your ARM Baseline template.
Edit your parameters and Deploy.
Here you saw a standard Virtual Machine Deployment, but you can add of course all of your Azure Resource Manager templates here including your NSG Base Line template. In this way your deployments are documented ( Scripts).
Azure DevOps Services is a cloud service for collaborating on code development. It provides an integrated set of features that you access through your web browser or IDE client. The features are included, as follows:
Git repositories for source control of your code
Build and release services to support continuous integration and delivery of your apps
Agile tools to support planning and tracking your work, code defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum methods
Many tools to test your apps, including manual/exploratory testing, load testing, and continuous testing
Highly customizable dashboards for sharing progress and trends
Built-in wiki for sharing information with your team
The Azure DevOps ecosystem also provides support for adding extensions and integrating with other popular services, such as: Campfire, Slack, Trello, UserVoice, and more, and developing your own custom extensions.
Choose Azure DevOps Services when you want the following results:
Quick set up
Maintenance-free operations
Easy collaboration across domains
Elastic scale
Rock-solid security
You’ll also have access to cloud load testing, cloud build servers, and application insights.
Azure DevOps Repo for your Templates
From here you can make your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Pipelines together with your Cloud Administrator Team 😉
When you have your Azure DevOps Private Repository in place and you like to work with Visual Studio for example, you can connect to your Repo and Check-in your NSG ARM Script but Deploy with Visual Studio to your Azure Virtual Datacenter.
So you see there are enough ways to deploy ARM Templates and this is not all, because you can also use Azure Cloudshell for example or other CLI command-line interfaces. But now we want to set the NSG Baseline for our Azure Subscription. A good start is to see the possibilities in the JSON scripting for Network Security Groups. Here you find the settings and explanation of Azure Components.
By Default is Internet available in a NSG ! So here you see that Internet is not allowed only the AzureCloud West Europe resources because some Azure SDK Component work via ” Public internet” ( Microsoft IP-Addresses). (RDP protocol is marked and not set in this example for Security reasons)
Internet by Default Rules, so you must set your security Rules !
Conclusion :
You really have to implement Azure Security by Design, make your Base-line with ARM Templates in a Private Repo for your Azure Network Security Groups with the Correct RBAC Configuration for your Cloud Administrator Team. Don’t make them manually and do settings manually when you have a lot of NSG’s ! Versions of your ARM templates are documented in your Repository 😉
Test Always first in a Dev-Test Azure Subscription or in Azure DevOps with a Test plan before you implement in Production.
Microsoft Azure Security Center
Security Center Overview
Microsoft Azure Secure Score Dashboard
Azure Security Center Recommendations
Open Subnet without NSG.
Creating NSG from Azure Security Center.
A subnet with NSG.
Security Center – Regulatory Compliance
PCI DSS 3.2
ISO 27001
SOC TSP
