Strengthen Your Defences Now With An Azure Security Assessment

Types of Azure Security Assessments 

For a thorough review of your current cloud setup, Azure security assessments fall into several key categories. A security assessment features elements such as: 

• Visibility Assessments 
• Identity Assessments 
• Data Risk Assessments 
• Configuration Assessment  

Visibility Assessment 

Rapid scaling, shadow IT, weak governance, siloed teams, and messy inventory management cause organisations to lose track of their assets, to name a few. Those resources spread across multi-clouds, on-prem, and hybrid environments can turn visibility into a guessing game. When data slips out of sight, and visibility fades away, securing becomes a losing battle.

It’s simple: You can’t protect what you cannot see… or don’t even know you have!

Hence, you need complete visibility over your Azure environment and its resources. That’s where a visibility assessment comes into play. It provides a transparent view of your cloud resources, thus making it easier to spot risks and looming threats. It involves inventorying that runs in your cloud. 

However, cloud environments don’t stand still; they are constantly moving and evolving. A solution with real-time monitoring and centralised dashboards is necessary to keep everything in check. 

Identity Assessment 

Identities have become more and more crucial for accessing resources, with organisations moving more towards the cloud and adopting SaaS applications. Cybercriminals know this too. They exploit authorised identities through phishing, malware, password spray attacks, and social engineering and that’s not even half of all the ways they get their hands on your sensitive data. 

• Stolen credentials and phishing remain the two entry points for hackers - both ties directly to user identities.  
• Microsoft Entra data shows over 600 million identity attacks per day, with 99% relying on passwords.  

The stakes are getting higher
Sophisticated attackers now target identity infrastructure itself. Once inside, threat actors manipulate infrastructure to stay hidden. They steal credentials, impersonate non-human identities, briefly escalate permissions to create new access credentials, steal data, and then restore everything to its original state – leaving little trace behind. Therefore, an identity assessment is a good starting point for securing your cloud infrastructure.  

An identity assessment evaluates the security actions related to identities within your Azure environment. The assessment involves checking for the efficiency of authentication methods, MFA settings, implementing RBAC controls, and so forth.

Review the Azure environment extensively and identify privilege escalation risks, excessive permissions, and separation of duty risks across roles, compute instances, and accounts. By the end, you’ll have a clearer view of toxic access combinations, dormant identities, and role responsibilities. Nonetheless, identity is just one layer of cloud security. To fully secure your Azure environment, you must also look at more, such as data. 

Data Risk Assessment 

Just like identities, data in the cloud falls under the umbrella of cloud customers. This is to say, they are responsible and accountable for the data they store and move within the cloud. This includes how data moves, who uses it, how it interacts, etc. Data doesn’t move on its own; people, or processes created by people, move it. This is why we should be even more cautious, as humans account for most errors in the cloud.

A data risk assessment can help your organisation create a comprehensive data security policy and ensure confidential data is adequately protected.

It includes an analysis of:

• Encryption practices
• Data classification
• Access controls

The aim is to protect data at rest and in transit, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. During a data risk assessment, security teams must review and check rights for everyone and anything with access to concerned data. Aside from that, it is vital to check unstructured and structured data.  

For instance: you might want to achieve a least-privilege access policy and track data movement by using policies and tags in Azure.  

Configuration Assessment 

Misconfigurations often pose the most significant security risk in the cloud. Azure Monitor, Microsoft Sentinel, and diagnostic logs help detect threats, but improper configurations or disabled logging can leave blind spots. Likewise, data doesn’t always stay where it should. It might be duplicated, moved, or stored across unintended storage locations, increasing the risk of exposure. Misconfigurations, whether in data storage, permissions such as being too permissive, or others, can have drastic consequences.

A configuration assessment is crucial for every organisation to ensure security and compliance. An Azure security configuration assessment involves evaluating your Azure environment to identify potential misconfigurations and security risks. 

Network Security Assessment 

A Network Security Assessment in Azure focuses on identifying vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and weak access controls that could expose your environment to attacks.  

This involves things like:

• Reviewing network security groups (NSGs)
• Virtual network (VNet) configurations
• Firewall rules
• Threat intelligence settings
• Traffic filtering policies
• Private endpoints

The goal is to ensure that network traffic is properly controlled and that security policies are correctly implemented. 

How do you prepare for an Azure Security Assessment? 

To prepare for an Azure Security Assessment, you must follow several steps to ensure a secure and compliant Azure environment. Like with many audits and assessments you must first define a clear goal. In a security assessment in Azure, such a goal can be: 

• Ensuring compliance 
• Encountering vulnerable controls 
• Improving overall security posture 

Afterwards, document your current Azure environment. Gather information about your Azure resources, configurations and access controls. Also, ensure you’ve got a list of all assets such as virtual machines, databases, storage accounts, and all other Azure services you may want to evaluate. 

1. When your goals and inventory are set in stone, identify and involve key stakeholders in the assessment process.
2. Then, create a cross-functional team and divide roles within the process.
3. Set clear boundaries for your assessment. 
4. Define which Azure regions, resource types, and applications will be reviewed. Be clear about what’s in scope and what’s not – out of scope Azure resources and assets should be explicitly listed.
5. Create a communication plan for how progress and findings will be shared with key stakeholders during the assessment. When you’ve checked all that off you can start the review.
6. Pull in Azure configuration data – subscriptions, resource groups, service settings and everything in between. This will give you a good view of your current setup.
7. List industry standards and regulations that apply to your organisation and dig up past security assessments or audit reports – finding these issues now will save you pain later.
8. Map out your current security controls – access policies, encryption methods, and monitoring tools. Then pull together network diagrams of your Azure environment and how data flows through it. These will be useful during the assessment.

Conducting the Azure Security Assessment 

An Azure security assessment is a multi-step process that evaluates the security of an organisation’s Azure environment. This must cover multiple management groups to ensure nothing gets missed. The assessment is not just to check the security score but to do an in-depth evaluation of security controls. This involves looking at access policies, encryption methods, and monitoring tools to find vulnerabilities. By doing this, organisations can ensure their Azure environment is secure from threats. 

Analysing and Remediation 

Once the Azure security assessment is complete, the next step is to analyse the results, which will show security vulnerabilities and areas for improvement. Reviewing these findings, you can prioritise remediation, first fixing the most critical issues to harden your overall security. 

Azure Security Assessment tools 

There are Azure Security Assessment tools that provide security recommendations; using them, you can enhance the security of your tenants in the Microsoft cloud. Some of these include: 

1. Azure Advisor 

Azure Advisor is a free tool that continually analyses your resource configuration, usage telemetry and then recommends solutions that can help you improve the security of your Azure resources.  

The provided actionable recommendations are real-time in the subscription context. From the moment your subscription is live, this service is available, and it is free. This tool offers recommendations specific to all the categories in the Well-Architected Framework.

But it is not just limited to security. Better yet, it provides recommended actions for performance, cost-effectiveness, performance, reliability, etc. These recommendations are divided into high, medium, and low impact. 

The tool also provides you with an Advisor Score, which aggregates advisor recommendations into a simple, actionable score to prioritise the actions that will yield the most significant improvement to the posture of your workloads. 

2. Defender for Cloud (formerly, Azure Security Center) 

Microsoft Defender for Cloud, previously Azure Security Center, is a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) with a set of security practices and measures designed to protect cloud-based applications from various cyber threats and security vulnerabilities. It goes beyond traditional security strategies while offering advanced threat detection for Azure and hybrid environments.  

Defender for Cloud combines the capabilities of: 

• A development security operations (DevSecOps) solution that unifies security management at the code level across multicloud and multiple pipeline environments.
• A cloud security posture management (CSPM) solution that surfaces actions that you can take to prevent breaches. 
• A cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) with specific protections for servers, containers, storage, databases, and other workloads.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is available as a free base product. However, additional costs apply when you add resource-specific plans (such as Virtual Machine, Key Vault, Database) or switch from Foundational Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) to Defender CSPM. Using this tool's recommendations (included by default) is a great way to do a self-assessment.

You can get enhanced security features like vulnerability management through integrated tools like Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management. 

While being a great tool, it may be more suitable for businesses looking for a deep, automated security solution that can give you detailed insights and proactive security recommendations. If you are on a tighter budget and have a limited subscription, reverting to Azure Advisor for basic guidance may be a better option.

3. Free Security Assessments 

Aside from using Microsoft’s native tools, consider using documentation on Microsoft website, such as free security assessments: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/security-insider/intelligence-reports/microsoft-digital-defense-report-2024 

4. Intercept’s Free Azure Security Scan 

At Intercept, we offer you a free security scan to see whether the security in your Azure tenant aligns with the latest security best practices within Azure. We often see customers not paying attention to the latest security best practices, which make them more vulnerable than they believe they are. 

Within this scan, we check your current security status and assess several aspects such as network security, identity, data, compliance, and more.  

For instance, in terms of identity, we consider multiple facets, including RBAC, Conditional Access, MFA, Microsoft Entra ID, assessing Identity Secure Score, Privileged Identity Management, and more. We include the best recommendations, such as implementing built-in policies for compliance with Azure policy. 

After the scan, you’ll receive: 

• Confirmation and additional insight into the actual safety of your environment with results reported in a document 
• A verification that your security aligns with Microsoft’s best practices (a proven footprint) 
• The complimentary benefit of an expert review 

Closing thoughts 

Performing regular assessments can help you identify threats and prevent them from happening. In the process, security teams must monitor and map all relationships, permissions, and policies around all organisational entities. 

Nonetheless, many security teams cannot find the time to assess their Azure environment. It is very time-consuming and can get complicated at times. This is often the case for dynamic organisations or those with distributed environments.