Pushpa Herath - Azure Cloud Security for Absolute Beginners: Enabling Cloud Infrastructure Security with Multi-Level Security Options

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.

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Azure cloud is a major cloud service provider embraced by many industries as the cloud platform of choice. Security of information, infrastructure, networks, and having compliance standards are of utmost important in cloud computing, and Microsoft Azure has a great set of security tools, configurations, and policies to comply with the required demands in the business world as well as governments.

The focus of this book is to help beginners who are moving to Azure cloud to understand the security concepts available in the platform, and to provide a hands-on guideline to set up security aspects effectively when deploying applications on top of Azure platform services as well as on top of Azure infrastructure. Fundamentals of Azure security are introduced, and discussion on management groups, subscriptions, management locks, and Azure policies further elaborate the concepts of Azure cloud security.

Azure Active Directory (AAD) and utilization of AAD in application security as well as infrastructure security is explained in detail in a full chapter. Essential aspects of keeping application keys, secrets, and certificates which is really helpful for developers and Ops teams in configuring applicationsis explained with regards to Azure Key Vault. The newest application security implementations such as utilizing Azure configurations, Azure defender, and Azure storage are discussed, and networking security aspects are described in detail for network security groups, gateways, load balancers, virtual networks, and firewall configurations. Creating more secure App Service Environments is further explained, and securing infrastructure is discussed in detail as well.

This book will be a useful reference guide for any beginner to get started implementing secure cloud solutions with Microsoft Azure.

I am thankful for all the mentors who have encouraged and helped me during my career and who have provided me with so many opportunities to gain the maturity and the courage I needed to write this book.

I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues who have helped and encouraged me in so many ways.

Last, but in no way least, I owe a huge debt to my family. Not only because they have put up with late-night typing, research, and my permanent air of distraction, but also because they have had the grace to read what I have written. My heartfelt gratitude is offered to them for helping me make this dream comes true.