Microsoft Security Moves Target Azure Cloud Services

Microsoft announced a slew of security enhancements this week, most focused on its Azure cloud services. The enhancements extend Azure Active Directory outside of the Microsoft world, demonstrating that Microsoft understands the hybrid and multi-cloud nature of most organizations today.

Azure Active Directory External Identities is an extension of Azure Active Directory to external identities. This allows Active Directory to secure and manage the identities of third parties that need access to corporate properties, including the range of Office 365 tools. This can provide greater visibility into who actually has access to an organization's applications and data. According to the company, it also will allow developers to build more user-centric experiences for external users and streamline how IT administrators manage directories and identities through Azure Active Directory.

Azure Security Center also received some updates, including Secure Score API, a new way for users of Azure cloud services to improve risk assessment and prioritize threat alerts. This API allows organizations to actually get a score on the security posture of their environment. According to Microsoft, it will provide a more effective way to assess risk in the environment and prioritize actions to reduce it.

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This type of scoring can be very important for many reasons, said Doug Cahill, vice president and group director for cybersecurity at Enterprise Strategy Group.

"Because of the dynamic nature of cloud, staying on top of how your cloud services are configured is really important. You can inadvertently introduce configuration vulnerabilities. You can leave your infrastructure open to a variety of exploits if you're not regularly hardening your configuration," he said.

It also helps address the confusion around who is actually responsible for configurations—the subscriber to cloud services or the cloud service provider. While Microsoft is not taking responsibility for updating configurations, this scoring capability does provide some visibility to subscribers on where they might have insecure configurations.

'Publisher Verified' Apps

Developers are the focus of the third announcement. Developers with a verified Microsoft Partner Network account can now mark apps "Publisher Verified." Through this capability, developers can essentially integrate a "publisher verified" stamp in the code, indicating that it is a legitimate piece of software. This will allow organizations to better understand whether verified or unverified apps are being used, and enable them to configure consent policies based on publisher verification, Microsoft said.

This is an important advance, Cahill said.

"Security to date has largely been treated as an afterthought," he said. "And now that lines of business are doing their own application development, it has become increasingly important to incorporate security at development time as well as build time and runtime."

Along the same lines, Microsoft has announced more granular application consent controls for IT administrators. This allows administrators to create more detailed policies that specify exactly which users can consent to specific applications. In other words, Cahill said, it gives developers a way to create a "white list" for end users based on policy.

Finally, Microsoft announced that its Authentication Library now supports additional platforms, including Angular (GA) and Microsoft.Identity.Web for ASP.NET Core. This essentially provides developers with more ways of authenticating access to applications they are building, Cahill explained.