Meanwhile, cybercrime continues to rise. Companies are expected to
lose a total of $8 trillion in 2023 from hacking attacks, and $10.5 trillion in 2025. Nearly everyone can be affected. For example, in 2022, 83% of all organizations
had more than one case of hacking.
For example, Microsoft spends
more than $1 billion a year just to strengthen Azure's security, and about 3,500 people work to improve the cloud. It has all the necessary certificates of compliance with industry requirements.
Identities Identification of users and granting them access to company data and programs is an important component of security in the cloud. To manage these processes, Azure AD has features such as setting up multi-factor authentication and conditional access, among others. The first involves several stages of verification using passwords or biometric data. The second performs an analysis of all security signals in relation to the user and generates an appropriate decision: grant access, restrict it, block it, or conduct an additional check. Only this helps to protect against 99.9% of cyber attacks.
Endpoint control Another important vector of cloud IT security is the management, protection and monitoring of endpoints, because in the current business realities, an organization may have an incredible number and variety of such points. This includes control of both personal devices and company devices accessing the corporate infrastructure. Before granting access, all endpoints must be checked for compliance with all necessary requirements.
Data With the migration to the cloud, protecting the corporate perimeter is no longer relevant. It should be replaced by data-level protection. The principle of ‘zero trust’ is implemented here through introducing the policy of least privilege access, end-to-end encryption, as well as in analytics and data classification in order to determine what information needs to be protected.
Applications Applications can also become a weak link in protection. Especially if it is shadow IT. The use of unauthorized programs is often the cause of data leakage, not to mention the fact that they complicate an organization's already complex cloud infrastructure. You can take control of the situation with the help of Microsoft Endpoint Management.
Infrastructure At the infrastructure level, protection is provided by telemetry provided in Microsoft Defender for Cloud. The solution performs real-time monitoring, detects, marks and automatically blocks suspicious activities, monitors any anomalies in the system. It also finds and fixes configuration errors, which are the most common vulnerability for complex cloud environments.
Network Zero trust should extend to devices and users even if they are on the corporate network. Therefore, all internal data exchange channels should be encrypted, and the network itself should be divided into micro-segments, access to each of which should be limited. These tasks are included in the functionality of Microsoft Network Security.
The Zero Trust model, combined with the security capabilities of Microsoft Azure solutions, creates a cloud environment that is highly secure and immune to cyber attacks.
