Why Microsoft Azure Excels in Data Security and BCDR Integration

Data security and BCDR (business continuity and disaster recovery) matter most when hardware fails, a natural disaster strikes or software breaks. You need a trusted platform that acts quickly, so you can recover data within no time after a disaster and keep it safe. Azure data security gives you that. Many small businesses cannot afford the high cost of securing their data on-premises. They can migrate to Azure and get the full benefits, including strong data security.

Even well-run businesses can suffer from a natural calamity or disaster. To prevent losses from outages, you can replicate your data to multiple regions continuously. This gives you high availability without failure.

Microsoft Azure Cloud

Azure provides many helpful features for Azure data security and recovery. They include backup and disaster recovery, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery and Azure Archive Storage. You can read more on the Microsoft Azure site.

Some major facts from the Azure portal are:

• 80% reduction in average data recovery time
• 370% 5-year ROI
• 97% reduction in lost end-user productivity from data loss

Azure Offerings

Azure Backup

You get one place for centralized backup services and solutions with Azure Backup. It helps organizations scale their storage needs. With the backup center, you can monitor, govern and optimize data protection in a consistent way.

The central setup also helps you define the policies for backup schedules. It can protect work environments like Azure VMs and Azure file shares.

When you maintain replicated environments, a failure can happen at any point in time. However, features like volume shadow copy and pre-post-processing scripts keep backing up data from virtual machines. They also restore it, so the applications that run stay consistent.

Backup data can take many forms. For example, Azure VMs and MySQL servers that run in Azure VMs can be backed up, and so can Azure files.

You can manage backup storage according to the needs of your data. Azure stores backups in three different ways:

• Locally redundant storage
• Geo-redundant storage
• Zone redundant storage

Azure Site Recovery

Businesses are at their most fragile when a natural disaster hits. To keep your business running smoothly, you need built-in disaster recovery.

Azure Site Recovery helps you keep business continuity through all planned and unplanned outages during application deployment and failover. Gartner named Microsoft a leader in its 2019 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery.

To use Azure Site Recovery, you replicate an Azure VM directly from the Azure portal to a different Azure region. With Azure Site Recovery, you can test your disaster recovery plan for compliance without affecting the production loads or the end users.

The applications that Azure Site Recovery supports stay highly available during outages. Recovery from on-premises to Azure or other regions happens automatically.

To restore a data backup, you need extra infrastructure. With Site Recovery, however, you can reduce the cost of deploying and maintaining on-premises disaster recovery infrastructure. You also save costs, because you pay for computing services on a pay-as-you-go model.

Azure Archive Storage

Cost-effective data storage is important, and so is separating data by the needs of the organization. Azure Archive Storage has the lowest price for an archive storage tier. It encrypts data at rest automatically.

Many organizations need to keep years of data, such as medical or educational records.

With intelligent tiering, you can place data in hot and cold tiers. All the leading data management partners support Archive storage. The data in Archive storage stays secure and highly available. You get different options to manage the export of data with minimum latency. You can store TBs of data at a very low cost and retrieve them as you need.

Azure Data Security: Encryption at Rest and in Transit

Azure data protection helps most when you secure your data at rest or in transit. You need to follow best practices for Azure data security and encryption for these states:

• At rest: this covers all your data from storage objects, or data in a static form, such as physical media.
• In transit: data is in transit whenever it moves between components or between geographic locations.

Azure Encryption Models

Azure supports various models, such as service managed keys and customer-managed keys on customer physical hardware. With client-side encryption, you can store keys in a secure location or on-premises.

Client-Side Encryption

This type of encryption happens outside of the Azure environment. With client-side encryption, cloud service providers cannot reach the encryption keys and cannot decrypt the data. You are the only one who controls the data.

It covers data that an application encrypts, either in a service application or in a customer data center. Azure then receives the encrypted data.

Server-Side Encryption

Server-side encryption offers the keys below to manage data control:

• Service managed keys: these keys combine control with a convenient way to control the data.
• Customer managed keys: you control the keys, so you can generate your own keys and use them under the Bring your own keys model.
• Service managed keys in customer-controlled hardware: this is a complex way to manage keys, because the keys sit outside of Microsoft control under the Microsoft Host your own key model. Many Azure services might not support this complex model.

Azure Key Vault

Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that stores your secrets safely and blocks unauthenticated access to them.

The vault provides the access control that secures encryption key access for end users. You must secure the encryption key, so store it in a safe location. A key vault increases security to a much greater extent. It also lets you control the keys and passwords that you use in different projects. The application that uses the keys or passwords has no direct access to any of them.

You can use the key vault to encrypt keys and passwords that you store in HSM. Even Microsoft employees cannot access or extract your keys. In addition, you can audit and monitor your keys with Azure logging.

When you store credentials or keys in the cloud with Azure Key Vault instead of on-premises, you improve performance and reduce latency issues for your applications.

Azure Resource Manager

Azure Resource Manager helps you work on the resources in your application as a single group. You can perform multiple operations, such as updating or deleting the resources as one whole. It also provides an Azure Resource Manager template that you can reuse for deployment, testing or production environments.

It also helps keep the application running in Azure secure, because it follows certain access controls. This is quite helpful compared with manual deployment, which can be vulnerable to risk.

Application Insights

Application Insights is an application performance management service. You can use it to monitor your live applications and to analyze their performance for errors. It also comes with analytics tools that review issues and check user activity in any application. It can monitor your application from the pre-testing phase to the published phase.

Application Insights can analyze the data for you. It can create charts and tables that help you gather insights, such as end-user interactions with the application or any dependency on third-party applications.

This tool maintains availability and security efficiently. You can also analyze issues and monitor them when you need a detailed analysis.

Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor analyzes your resources and gathers insights. You can use them to improve the security and performance of your applications. In the same way, you can keep a check on the overall expense of Azure resources and remove what you do not need from your resource pool.

The recommendations from Microsoft Defender for Cloud come from a security analysis. They help you improve the security of the application architecture, or of applications that already run on Azure.

Conclusion

Azure provides a wide range of security features that encrypt your data at rest and in transit. They include Azure Firewall, WAF and Azure Firewall Manager. Microsoft has invested more than 1 billion dollars in cybersecurity and research development. It has also hired the greatest number of cybersecurity experts.

With Azure’s multi-layered security model and its cybersecurity experts, you get a secure foundation. You can implement the best practices with simplified security models and built-in controls for your workloads. The global security features in Azure can identify unknown threats easily. If you plan a move to the cloud, our custom software team can help.