Azure: Security and Compliance Services

Security and compliance are two words that should be at the forefront of any e-commerce entrepreneurs mind. These are both concepts that are highly important for making sure your business stays viable and even just operational at a basic level without being shut down or seriously irritating customers and losing their faith and trust.

Security & Compliance Overview

This particular part of Azure allows your security management function as a service through Azure.  The same service also allows you to detect potential threats before they happen. They give you the ability to focus more on prevention than cleaning up after these threats after the fact. And, obviously, threat detection and prevention is vastly superior to trying to go in and undo damage after it has already occurred. You’ll save time, money and a lot of frustration. Not to mention the effects on morale at your company and your reputation for staying ahead of problems in general.

After all, people are less likely to do business with you in general if they don’t think that you have the ability to properly handle your own security and compliance issues.

Security Without Infrastructure

Another aspect of this that’s often worth mentioning is how the initial costs for security can be circumvented this way as well. If you try to create your own system then it often means that you’re going to be spending a lot of money on buying the initial servers and other infrastructure needed to carry it out. Instead, everything will be provided for you as a service and it will largely be a plug and play approach. This is especially useful for business owners that are interested in finding ways to save time or those that don’t have a lot of experience trying to figure out how to set up their own security.

Prevention Measures

Azure Security and Compliance services have the ability to recognize patterns indicating aggressive actions against your service early. The way it can do this is by noticing that certain types of threats tend to have particular patterns associated with them. Plus there’s going to be a big database of IP addresses that tend to have malicious intent. And even if this isn’t the case in a particular threat against you, an IP pattern can quickly emerge. This allows the system to figure out that this is the case early and then inform you of the dangers before they coalesce and emerge.

Plus, even if an attack is imminent or even ongoing, prevention and damage reduction measures can help in this case as well. This is because the analysis available through this Azure service makes it possible to figure out exactly how large an attack is so that you can manage the response to it and the resources available to fight it responsibly and intelligently. Complications are also possible to respond to with this type of service. For example, not all potential threats are just going to have a single aspect to them.

Some threats have multiple sources and come from multiple different angles simultaneously. This could be multiple different sources for data on your network or elsewhere, or it could be different vectors of attack from different places on the web. Being able to recognize the pattern and identify the source is one of the advantages that you’re going to have using an Azure service such as this one from Azure.

Automation

The system from Azure can gather information automatically. It is largely an easy setup, and after you get the agents connected in, the Azure service will start to put together all the data you need automatically. It will even handle selecting the data so you don’t have to worry about this part of it either. Given the amount of work and effort that goes into making sure that you are keeping track of your own security, automation can really give you an edge since you can focus your efforts more on what you do best.

Security Checks

Another part of the service that Azure emphasizes is how it makes it possible to do auditing for your security in a smoother manner than what is typically possible otherwise. In other words, you’ll be able to cut down on how long it takes to completely check your security measures for whatever specific security loopholes without needing to expend a lot of resources on the task. This could include penetration tests or any number of other types, all based on need. The service also allows you to create a full record of every bit of the test that’s even indexed so that you can search it.

You can also share the log in whatever manner makes the most sense for you with every single bit of it being recorded. This is particularly important in the sense that it allows you to go over it with a fine-toothed comb after the fact to determine what went wrong, or right, at every step of the way.

This could even be useful legally depending on what happens. Having it happen automatically is also important, of course, due to the fact that you don’t ever know exactly when a security event is going to occur. Plus, it’s hard to say what sorts of patterns you’ll be able to find beforehand. You really need to have full coverage on a 24/7 basis. There may be other processes that you’re carrying out on other services that have bearing on what’s happening with the one being attacked, and only a full sense of the time stamp and event will allow you to correlate these things together.

Obviously, regular security checks are going to be an integral part of keeping any system safe, and Azure can make this process much easier for you. This is especially important if you have a company that has enough of an online presence to have a higher likelihood of attacks.

Additional Benefits

It doesn’t always seem readily apparent from the start, but there’s often the need to store data when it comes to security concerns. Storing data securely is definitely a part of what this part of the Azure service can offer. At the same time, you can also keep track of both your data and any event related to security. Plus, it can do this in a way that isn’t going to bankrupt you. When it comes to business, it’s not enough just to be able to do something, after all, you must do it in a cost-efficient manner or it could bring down the whole operation and defeat the entire purpose of the enterprise in the first place.

This service allows you to do that for longer than other services and while making fewer mistakes or recording events incorrectly. Additionally, since you’re under the Azure umbrella, it becomes possible to take advantage of other Microsoft services and products. This includes protection and recovery service, analytics, and various other forms of automation. It’s definitely convenient to be able to have these options readily available without having to go find them from a third-party, instead, they are all available here under the same roof.

For more information about Azure services and how they can help your business, please make sure that you contact us today.