Whether you’re a business owner, a systems administrator, or anyone concerned about your cybersecurity and IT, you need to know the solutions available to help prevent attacks against your organization. Cyberattacks have become increasingly common and expensive, which is why nothing is more valuable than your peace of mind. As innovators in all things about computers and IT infrastructure, Microsoft has developed a platform which allows for the construction of customized cybersecurity policies. Let’s talk about Azure Policies.
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Microsoft’s Azure Policies help you to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance at scale. An Azure policy will evaluate the resources in Azure by comparing the properties of said resources to the business’ rules. In other words, Azure does the work of looking at the established cybersecurity rules and how well employees are adhering to them. This is especially important when we consider how many cyber attacks prove to be successful because of a seemingly minor mistake by an employee.
To simplify management, several rules can be grouped into a policy initiative or policy set. Once your business rules have been formed, the definition or initiative is assigned to any scope of resources that Azure supports, including management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, or individual resources. Business rules for handling non-compliant resources vary widely between organizations. Examples of how an organization wants the platform to respond to a non-compliant resource include:
- Deny the resource change
- Log the change to the resource
- Alter the resource before the change
- Alter the resource after the change
- Deploy related compliant resources
Custom policies are configuration files which define the behaviors of your Azure Active Directory B2C or Azure AD B2C tenant. A custom policy is fully configurable and policy-driven. A custom policy, therefore, facilitates trust between entities in standard protocols.
A custom policy definition allows customers to define their own rules for using Azure. These rules frequently enforce:
- Security practices
- Cost management
- Organization-specific rules (such as naming or locations)
With Azure policies, only certain users can make changes to the policies to help protect the security of the company.
One of the keys to Azure security is that these policies are editable to meet your organization’s and customer’s needs. Who can edit these policies? Security Center uses Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC), which provides built-in roles you can assign to Azure users, groups, and services. When users open Security Center, they will see only information related to the resources they can access. This means that users are assigned the roles of owner, contributor, or reader to the resource’s subscription. There are also two Security Center-specific roles:
- Security readers have the rights to view Security Center items such as recommendations, alerts, policy, and health. But they can’t make challenges.
- Security admins have the same viewing rights as the security readers, but they can also update the security policy and dismiss alerts.
Before creating custom policies, it’s always wise to check out policy examples to find out which, if any, preexisting policies match your needs. The basic steps for creating a custom policy are:
- Identify your business requirements
- Map each requirement to an Azure resource property
- Map the property to an alias
- Determine which effect to use
- Compose the policy definition
While these steps may sound simple, they each have their own complexities that make them difficult for laypeople to decipher and execute without the help of cybersecurity specialists, which is why the Innovative Integration team is experienced with Microsoft Azure and many other cybersecurity solutions. So, if you need help improving your IT security, you can know that we have the knowledge and expertise you need.
