Securing the Azure Storage Infrastructure

Organizations have been banking on Azure Storage infrastructure for sophisticated services that it offers. However, understanding how to secure data accessibility in Azure Storage is vital for organizations for accurate access control, activity logging, and getting usage metrics. As security can be easily controlled and managed with Azure, organizations can use a range of policies for achieving the degree of access control that their applications need.

As data volumes grow exponentially and become more complex, it is getting more and more difficult to manage and store this data. This has made organizations bank on public cloud storage, such as Azure Storage, for realizing the scalability and accessibility they aim. Benefits of Azure Storage infrastructure are significant, however, securing the storage account calls for additional responsibilities.

What Approach Must Organizations Take?

Organizations have realized that public cloud computing needs a novel approach to security. For its Azure cloud, Microsoft offers a secure infrastructure and operational security. Organizations are needed to maintain their responsibility to secure their application workloads, data, and resources that they control. It is imperative that organizations understand the shared responsibility model and meet security responsibilities at their end. 

It is vital for organizations to ensure that their cloud computing resources are secure by configuring and leveraging services such as Azure. The Azure Storage infrastructure enables organizations to safeguard their cloud environment by following security best practices. It also offers them with a robust security solution that delivers a comprehensive visibility of their infrastructure security.

Key Benefits of Azure Storage Infrastructure

Following are some benefits that organizations gain from Azure Storage infrastructure.

  • Organizations can enable a secure transfer for ensuring that the data encryption is in transit. This enhances the security of their storage account by allowing account requests through a secure connection.
  • Azure Storage enables organizations to encrypt their data similar to the way it is stored in the data center. Also, it allows for automatic decryption of the data for organizations to gain secure access.
  • Organizations can leverage the storage account access keys, which are periodically regenerated. Also, they can ensure undermining any inadvertent exposure or access to these keys.
  • Azure Storage infrastructure allows organizations to protect their data at rest by enabling service encryption.
  • Organizations can private and disable anonymous access to blob containers. This allows them to give read-only access to resources without sharing their account key and eliminating the need for a shared access signature.

To Sum Up

With Azure Storage, organizations can realize a secure infrastructure that is massively scalable and available worldwide. This helps them in bolstering their cybersecurity, especially when cyberattacks are growing in sophistication and complexity. Microsoft continues to add advanced threat protection features to its Azure Storage, with an aim to deliver an additional layer of security intelligence that spots malware uploads to cloud storage accounts. As more and more organizations move to the cloud for leveraging its flexibility and performance benefits, Azure Storage will see high adoption, helping organizations in maintaining a secure infrastructure.

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Why Public Cloud Security is A Shared Responsibility

While public cloud is seeing high reverence among organizations, associated security still remains a hot topic for debate. According to Forbes, over 83% of organizational workloads are estimated to run on public cloud. While it is indispensable for organizations to provide digital safety, the line of responsibility for cloud security between vendors and enterprises is becoming blurred.

The shared responsibility model emerged as a viable solution to maintaining robust public cloud security. To ensure a highly secure cloud environment, organizations must educate their business stakeholders on the shared cloud security for mitigating issues entailed by errors of internal stakeholders. The organizations must also focus on creating a team of cloud security that engulfs diverse and proficient skill sets.

Important Aspects of the Shared Responsibility Model

By focusing on key aspects of the shared responsibility model, organizations can secure their data and networks in the public cloud. Also, with these, organizations can ensure enhanced security while enabling faster deployment and alleviating misconfigurations for all of their cloud-based applications.

The cloud service providers are accountable for the protection and ensuring availability of the cloud services and infrastructure. The cloud infrastructure encompasses the networking, hardware, software, and facilities, which run cloud services of the respective vendor.

Organizations are responsible for their cloud-deployed assets and management. Organizations design their own novel strategy for security and manage risks for cloud services, data, and assets they add in the public cloud. They are responsible for managing their data with encryption options, classifying their assets, and leveraging IAM tools for accurate permissions.

Why is the Shared Responsibility Model Important?

As certain boundaries differ between applications, the emphasis of cloud service providers is hinged on protecting infrastructure and services that include networking, software, and hardware. Organizations are responsible for their security infrastructure that protects the data with factors such as user identity verification, access control for high-risk areas, safeguarding credential theft, and ensuring that applications are not leveraged as delivery mechanisms for cyberattacks.

In the digital transformation journey, several organizations forget their responsibility for protecting the data stored off-site. This unawareness poses risks to storage components and makes them prone to cyberattacks. The actual risk lies in futile objectives of organizations who look to achieve the bare minimum from their cloud migration strategies.

According to Gartner, the public cloud market is expected to grow by 17% in 2020, with outcomes-associated expectations from cloud investments presumably being higher. Most businesses are making heavy investments in the public cloud architecture. This is mainly because organizations continuously gain an unparalleled agility in IT operations, which helps them maintain a competitive edge.

To Conclude

Proactive organizations have been skeptical about handing the security of their infrastructure to the cloud service providers. However, most businesses are now concentrating on their cybersecurity budgets and making investments in cloud security. More and more organizations are spending on data security and protection.

Organizations are increasingly devoting great amounts of resources to reinforce their defenses and embed security-by-design. Thus, security in the public cloud is a shared responsibility, wherein organizations have a major role to play starting from the phase where they choose a cloud provider for managing their infrastructure.

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