Advantages and disadvantages of azure security

Has a开发者_运维问答nyone seen details or a White paper on azure security and the positives and negatives compared to your own hosting?

Securing Microsoft's Cloud Infrastructure

Security Mental Model for Azure

Cloud Security Frame

Outlook for Azure – scattered clouds but generally sunny

Security Considerations for Client and Cloud Applications

abmv has a full set of links.

Just wanted to add one point: The azure platform is highly automated, so there are very few manuall operations, at least compared with the hosting companies I have seen. This reduces the chance of security problems due to human error, forgetting a configuration setting for example.

Azure security whitepapers are available at the Azure Trust Center: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/trust-center/security/

This is also a helpful document for Security Best Practices for Azure Solutions: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/8/A/78AB795A-8A5B-48B0-9422-FDDEEE8F70C1/SecurityBestPracticesForWindowsAzureSolutionsFeb2014.docx

In practice, many customers choose to mix several compute types in their cloud environment, as certain models may apply better to different tasks; multiple cloud services, virtual machines, and Web Sites can all work in conjunction. The pros and cons of each should be weighed when making architectural decisions.

There is great potential and promise for the cloud, but those looking to adopt cloud computing are understandably nervous and excited about the business prospects. Customers are excited about reducing capital costs, divesting themselves of infrastructure management, and taking advantage of the agility delivered by on-demand provisioning of cloud-based assets. However, IT architects are also concerned about the risks of cloud computing if the environment and applications are not properly secured, and also the loss of direct control over the environment for which they will still be held responsible. Thus, any cloud platform must mitigate risk to customers as much as possible, but it is also incumbent on the subscriber to work within the cloud platform to implement best practices as they would for on-premises solutions.

Moving to a cloud platform is ultimately a question of trust vs. control. With the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, the customer places trust in the cloud provider for managing and maintaining hardware. The cloud provider secures the network, but the customer must secure the host and the applications. However, for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), the customer gives further control of the host, the network, and runtime components. Thus, the cloud vendor would be responsible for ensuring that the host and runtime are properly secured from threats. In both cases, the customer would be responsible for securing applications and data (e.g., authentication, authorization, configuration management, cryptography, exception management, input validation, session management, communication, audit and logging). Software as a Service (SaaS) presents one further level of abstraction. In this case, the cloud provider manages all levels of the stack all the way up to the application. Customers provide configuration information and sometimes high level code, but that is the end of their responsibility.

Generally, traditional threats will continue to exist in the cloud, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) or code injection attacks, Denial-of-Service (DOS) attacks, or credential guessing attacks. Some old threats are mitigated, since patching may be automated (for Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS, only), and cloud resiliency improves failover across a service. Some threats are expanded, such as those concerning data privacy (location and segregation) and privileged access. New threats are introduced, such as new privilege escalation attacks (VM to host, or VM to VM), jail-breaking the VM boundary or hyper-jacking (a rootkit attack on the host or VM). Microsoft has taken extraordinary measures to protect Azure against those classes of threats.

Worth also checking into the Azure Security Information Site - we'll be adding a lot more dev-centric security content there in this calendar year https://aka.ms/AzureSecInfo