As cloudβοΈ journey matures, each company π¨ knows that service requirements and needs will be changing. As cloud providers add new features and products, the new market opportunities and possibilities will rise.
There are several reasons why you would want to pursue the cloud landing zones. Using the start small and expand landing zone, you could get started with cloud adoption at a low-risk pace, and build up the security, governance, and regulatory policies over time.
As a benefit, with “start small and expand” you can use Azure Resource Manager templates and Azure Policy to create a CI/CD pipelines for subscriptions with Azure Blueprints.
As an ongoing improvement effort, you could expand and improve the landing zone with the Cloud Adoption Framework enterprise-scale design guidelines from Microsoft Azure β’
The Administrative Units (AU) are Azure AD resources which can contain only users and groups.
AUs could manage permissions π‘οΈπ in a role to any segment of your organization. For example, you could use AUs to delegate the User Administrator role to regional support specialists, so they can manage users only in the region that they support.
The AUs are especially helpful when an organization whose IT department is scattered across globe and wants to categorize and define relevant geographical boundaries.
Currently, supported scenarious from Azure AD portal are:
Create administrative units
Add users and groups members of administrative units
Assign IT staff to administrative unit-scoped administrator roles.
Well, it is a CloudβοΈ Access Security Broker (CASB) π‘οΈ π that supports various deployment π modes; like log collection, API connectors, and reverse proxy.
You can get a rich visibility, control over data travel, and sophisticated analytics to identify and combat cyberthreats across all yourΒ Microsoft Azure β’Β and third-party cloud services.
Cloud App Security integrates visibility with your cloud by providing: βοΈ Cloud Discovery βοΈ Sanctioning and unsanctioning an app βοΈ App connectors βοΈ Conditional Access App Control protection βοΈ Policy Control βοΈ Types of apps to migrate
During my journey to become a Microsoft Azure Security professional, I have compiled set of useful resources in addition to the exam materials. These resources do complement cloud and application security with open-source tooling, and a book that is much needed for success.
I am excited to share this with my network and DevSecOps enthusiasts π
WhiteSource Bolt – is a #free developer tool for finding and fixing open source vulnerabilities.
Sqlmap – is an open source penetration testing tool that automates the process of detecting and exploiting SQL injection flaws and taking over of database servers – http://sqlmap.org/
OpenVAS – Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner is a full-featured vulnerability scanner. Its capabilities include unauthenticated testing, authenticated testing, various high level and low level Internet and industrial protocols, performance tuning for large-scale scans and a powerful internal programming language to implement any type of vulnerability test. – https://openvas.org/
Recon-ng – is a full-featured Web Reconnaissance framework written in Python. Complete with independent modules, database interaction, built in convenience functions, interactive help, and command completion, Recon-ng provides a powerful environment in which open source web-based reconnaissance can be conducted quickly and thoroughly – https://tools.kali.org/information-gathering/recon-ng
OWASP Glue – is a framework for running a series of tools. Generally, it is intended as a backbone for automating a security analysis pipeline of tools – https://github.com/OWASP/glue
Awesome DevSecOps book. Inspired by the awesome-* trend on GitHub. This is a collection of documents, presentations, videos, training materials, tools, services and general leadership that support the DevSecOps mission. These are the essential building blocks and tidbits that can help you to arrange for a DevSecOps experiment or to help you build out your own DevSecOps program.
#lambhack is A vulnerable serverless lambda application. This is certainly a bad idea to base any coding patterns of what you see here. It allows you to take advantage of our tried and true application security problems, namely arbitrary code execution, XSS, injection attacks and more.
Black Duck is a commercial alternative to WhiteSource Bolt. It helps to manage the risks that come with the use of open source. Black Duck software composition analysis solutions and open source audits give you the insight you need to track the open source in your code, mitigate security and license compliance risks, and automatically enforce open source policies using your existing DevOps tools and processes.
OWASP Honeypot-Project. Goal of the OWASP Honeypot Project is to identify emerging attacks against web applications and report them to the community, in order to facilitate protection against such targeted attacks. Based around the earlier OWASP/WASC Distributed Web Honeypots Project.
Open Source Honeypots That Detect Threats For Free. You could read details on this interesting post.
Note: in noway this presents a complete guide. However, I hope it will guide your project into a more successful DevSecOps state.
I do encouragetoΒ comment and shareΒ your tips and resources here. This will ultimately help every community member to become a better security professional. Thanks!
Updates: This exam had a number of changes from the mid 2020 till now. I have updated exam objectives and some of the listed references to be up-t0-date..
I am back with a new study guide AZ-500: Azure Security Technologies Associate.
This is a very important exam for anyone who puts security at the core of a solution – deployed into Azure Cloud environment. In this respect, it is invaluable for any professional whose responsibilities include: maintaining the security posture, identifying, and remediating vulnerabilities by using a variety of security tools, implementing threat protection, and responding to security incident escalations.
By the way, you could also check out the following study guides, if interested ππ
By learning this topic, you as a candidate will gain strong skills in scripting and automation; a deep understanding of networking, virtualization, and cloud N-tier architecture. Your strong familiarity with cloud capabilities and products and services for Azure is very critical to succeed.
Getting AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Associate
In this section, you will get to know the official exam objectives, free Microsoft Learn materials and additional materials that I have used. On a high level, the skills that are measured in this exam are:
Actually, you could find this information on the official Microsoft exam website.
Useful resources that helped me along the way:
Here are the references which will serve you a way for successful digestion of the security materials. I would like to thank Pete Zerger – a Microsoft MVP & Cybersecurity Strategist for his informative content & professional support. He has really valuable posts and training courses on the LinkedIn platform.
There were many breaks in my study where I paused to search for Azure Security documentation on Microsoft Docs. However, discovering the GitHub repo from AzureMentor highly helped me to save some time, while getting familiar with exam objectives.
Thus, the @AzureMentor GitHub pages on Azure-AZ-500-Study-Guide have direct links into each high level objective as well as outlined items within it.
I would like to thank my family and kids for providing me with the opportunity to complete my journey. Big thanks to close friends and #linkedinfaily for continued support.
That’s all friends! Hope this sharing will encourage you to start your own cloud journey.
And as always, feel free to get connected and leave your comment(s). The whole LinkedIn family will benefit from your suggestions and feedback.
