Azure Defender for Cloud: A New Era in Cloudsecurity.

Introduction:

Today’s cloud computing has become the backbone of businesses and organizations. It provides an easy and efficient way to store, manage, and access data anywhere. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Protecting cloud resources from unauthorized access, cyberattacks, and data breaches is crucial. This protection ensures that the data stored in the cloud remains confidential, secure, and available only to authorized personnel. Moreover, safeguarding cloud resources also helps prevent financial losses, reputational damage, and legal consequences from data breaches and cyberattacks. Therefore, it is imperative to take all necessary measures to secure our cloud resources and protect sensitive information.

A practical solution has emerged to address the changing requirements of cloud security. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a CNAPP that provides security measures and practices to safeguard cloud-based applications against diverse cyber threats and vulnerabilities. It is called the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP).

What is Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

A few years ago, Azure Security Centre (ASC) offered a security management system to enhance the security posture of Azure cloud resources and provide advanced threat protection. Lately, ASC was rebranded as Microsoft Defender for Cloud, marking an evolution that promises superior cybersecurity solutions. This rebranding wasn’t just a name change but a significant improvement that offers comprehensive security solutions.

CNAPP platforms offer enhanced security measures across the entire development process – from code to cloud – by combining and improving multi-cloud threat prevention and detection capabilities. These platforms include:

• Cloud security elements like Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM),
• Cloud Workload Protection (CWP), and
• Cloud Development Security Operations (DevSecOps).

One significant benefit of using MS Defender for Cloud is its ability to seamlessly integrate with other public cloud services such as AWS and Google and on-premise servers. Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) for all your Azure, on-premises, and multi-cloud resources, including Amazon AWS and Google GCP.

How does CSPM work in Defender for Cloud?

Microsoft Defender’s Cloud security strategy has a crucial element called cloud security posture management (CSPM). CSPM offers a comprehensive overview of the security status of your assets and workloads and provides recommendations to help improve your security posture quickly and efficiently. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a system that helps organizations proactively identify and address misconfigurations, threats, misuse, and compliance violations across a multi-cloud infrastructure. Defender for cloud utilizes a Secure Score to provide an overview of the overall security posture. The Secure Score increases when you remediate recommendations and alerts. Your environment is more secure the closer your Secure Score is to 100.

Defender for cloud includes Foundational CSPM capabilities for free. The Defender CSPM plan allows you to enable advanced CSPM capabilities.

• Foundational CSPM (Free)—Defender for Cloud provides free basic multi-cloud CSPM capabilities. These capabilities are automatically enabled for subscriptions, and accounts (AWS and GCP) are onboarded to Defender for Cloud by default.
• Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) plan – The optional, paid Defender for Cloud Secure Posture Management plan provides more advanced security posture features.

The following table summaries the difference between both offerings with CSPM:

Defender for cloud continuously evaluates your resources against security standards established for Azure subscriptions, AWS accounts, and GCP projects. Based on these evaluations, Defender for Cloud will issue actionable security recommendations.

When you enable Defender for Cloud on an Azure subscription, it automatically activates the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB) compliance standard. This standard provides security recommendations to enhance your security posture. Defender for cloud also generates a secure score based on some of these MCSB recommendations. The higher the score, the lower the level of risk identified.

Integrations

Microsoft Defender for Cloud now provides built-in integrations that allow you to seamlessly manage and track tickets, events, and customer interactions using third-party systems. You can quickly push recommendations to a third-party ticketing tool and assign remediation responsibility to a team.

Using integration, you can streamline your incident response process and improve your ability to manage security incidents. This helps you track, prioritize, and resolve security incidents more efficiently. You also have the option to choose which ticketing system to integrate. Please note that ServiceNow integration is the only option currently supported for preview.

How does CWP work in Defender for Cloud?

To protect your workload from threats, it’s crucial to implement proactive security measures. CWP surfaces workload-specific recommendations that help you identify the proper security controls to protect your workloads.

Defender for cloud has a reactive feature called Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) that allows you to receive alerts about potential cyberattacks, such as brute-force attacks, from Defender for Servers. Moreover, you can set up automatic responses in case of Defender for Cloud detects a cyberattack in your environment.

Defender for cloud offers enhanced security features that generate alerts in case of possible cyberattacks or malicious actions targeting your resources. You can access these alerts on the Alerts page in Defender for Cloud, which provides detailed information about the nature and severity of the threat.

If a threat occurs in your environment, responding quickly to limit the risk to your resources is essential. Security alerts will notify you of any threat, allowing you to plan your response accordingly.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides various plans to protect the different resources, such as Defender for servers, Defender for containers, Defender for APIs, Defender for App service, Defender for Storage, Defender for Keyvault, Defender for Resource manager, Defender for DNS and Defender for Database.

For multi-cloud resources, you can protect AWS Virtual machines and AWS EKS containers from the AWS cloud, GCP Virtual machines, and GCP GKE containers with the Defender for servers and Containers plan, respectively.

How does DevSecOps work in Defender for Cloud?

Defender for cloud is a tool that helps you implement reasonable security practices early in the software development process, also known as DevSecOps. With this tool, you can safeguard your code management environments and pipelines and gain valuable insights into your development environment’s security posture, all from a single location. Defender for the cloud enables security teams to manage DevOps security across multiple pipeline environments efficiently.

We must activate the Defender for DevOps feature using Azure DevOps, GitLab, or GitHub to use this service. This service allows security teams to safeguard applications and resources from code to the cloud across multiple pipeline environments, including Azure DevOps, GitLab, and GitHub. By correlating DevOps security findings, such as misconfigurations in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and exposed secrets, with other contextual cloud security insights, we can prioritize remediation in the code.

Final Thoughts:

It is important to note that Azure Defender for Cloud has a range of tools and capabilities designed to detect and prevent cyber threats. These tools include, but are not limited to, threat intelligence, behavioural analytics, and machine learning-based anomaly detection.

Pricing is dependent on cloud size, and billing is based on Server, Storage account, and Database counts only. Please refer to the Azure pricing page for more information.

This product offers customized functionalities to cater to an organization’s needs, including integrating with existing security solutions and providing advanced threat protection across multiple cloud-based environments. Implementing this product ensures that an organization’s data and resources are protected against an ever-evolving threat landscape.