Microsoft Azure Security Center Platform

One of the strongest points of an Azure based eCommerce is the built-in security capabilities that are part of Microsoft’s Azure cloud hosting infrastructure. Azure has consistently gone through years of rigorous sets of testing and production usage on a highly enterprise level. The result is heavy exposure to a myriad of different attack types and vulnerability assessments, which essentially cover the entire scope of possibilities for an infrastructure system.

When Azure is properly integrated with an eCommerce application, the ultimate outcome is a constantly evolving infrastructure and hosting capability. It is able to yield tremendous value from a security perspective, while minimizing the costs and overall overhead for setup and configuration. One of the fundamental offerings that the Microsoft Azure platform brings to bear, from a security perspective, is the Azure Security Center; a simple but extremely powerful capability that's built into the Azure infrastructure. The Security Center includes the required means to actually audit all of the aspects, referred to as resources, within the Azure resource group.

Typically, resource groups are configured around applications and “resources” that support those applications. It's possible to have different regions and aspects of the development pipeline that fall into distinct resource groups. But the ultimate concept is that the Security Center allows for auditing and validation of the security of the application on an ongoing, continual basis. The learning dashboards provide the ability to practically take action from the alerts the system generates.

How the Security Center Helps You Enhance Your Defense

A beautiful thing about the Microsoft Azure Security Advisor is that it's constantly evolving and improving as new threats arise. This service is packed into the offering the Microsoft Azure team has put together, so that your Azure eCommerce platform can turn on the Security Center functionality for a relatively low cost. The incredibly high volume of revenue that's passing through Azure demands the system to constantly develop, focusing on security and addressing common threats. This ability is really fundamental from a value-add perspective, because it allows you to take advantage of this rapid, real-time security protection.

Therefore, your Azure eCommerce platform can leverage the Security Center to dramatically improve baseline security opportunities. It specifically enables you to reduce threats and footprint for being exploited or misused (knowingly or unknowingly) with the data within your eCommerce application.

The Azure Security Center is constantly on duty and keeps watch across the entire set of resources, including:

• The Azure SQL database
• The Azure app services
• All of the networking and hard drives
• The overall infrastructure that is utilized to connect all of those resources together

The Security Center also monitors the settings and configuration for all the resources, for things like protocols in use for SSL and whether or not:

• Data is encrypted properly at rest and is following best practices
• Configurations are encrypted properly
• Best practices are used for open ports within the app services
• The equal database is properly secured per industry best practices

Not only is this really helpful from a physical security perspective, but it also helps significantly from the aspect of validation, customer satisfaction, as well as from a reporting and auditing perspective for PCI DSS compliance. We typically recommend not just stopping there with the Azure Security Center, but also going ahead and running PCI DSS scans against the eCommerce application.

At this point we would like to mention that most PCI DSS scans don't go as deep into the infrastructure as the Azure Security Center will. So if, for whatever reason, the application and the infrastructure were compromised, PCI DSS scans wouldn't be as thorough as the Azure Security Center but they will both partially overlap. We definitely encourage clients to utilize best practices for their particular expectations on the level of security they’re planning and looking to adhere to.

• Microsoft Azure eCommerce Overview
• Microsoft Azure Security Platform
• SQL Database Components for Azure eCommerce
• Application Services within Azure eCommerce
• ECommerce API Integration
• Scaling & Application Performance Optimization
• Elevated Azure eCommerce Security & API Incorporation
• How Caching Raises Performance