Welcome to Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center provides a unified view into your security posture across all of your cloud and on-premises workloads. It helps you prevent, detect, and respond to threats with increased visibility, intelligent security analytics, and integrated security tooling.
Security Center offers a set of capabilities that help you strengthen your security posture, protect against threats, and gain deep insights into your security situation. This documentation will guide you through its core functionalities.
Getting Started with Azure Security Center
To begin using Azure Security Center, navigate to the Azure portal and search for "Security Center". You can enable it for your Azure subscriptions and connect your non-Azure machines.
- Sign in to the Azure portal.
- Search for "Security Center" in the top search bar.
- Select your subscription and click "Enable Security Center".
- For on-premises or other cloud machines, deploy the Log Analytics agent.
Key Features
Azure Security Center offers a comprehensive suite of security features:
- Asset Inventory: Gain visibility into all your cloud and hybrid resources.
- Security Posture Management: Continuously assess and improve your security posture.
- Threat Protection: Detect and respond to advanced threats across your workloads.
- Regulatory Compliance: Monitor and report on compliance against various industry standards.
- Vulnerability Assessment: Identify and remediate vulnerabilities in your virtual machines and containers.
- Network Security: Monitor network traffic and enforce security policies.
Security Recommendations
Security Center analyzes your resources and provides actionable security recommendations. These recommendations help you reduce your attack surface and enhance your security posture. Examples include:
- Applying system updates.
- Configuring disk encryption.
- Enabling multi-factor authentication.
- Restricting network access.
You can prioritize recommendations based on severity and implement them directly or via automated workflows.
Threat Investigation and Response
When a threat is detected, Security Center provides detailed information to help you investigate. The Advanced Threat Protection capabilities leverage machine learning and behavioral analytics to identify suspicious activities.
The Incident view consolidates related alerts into actionable incidents, providing a timeline and context for each event. You can use this information to understand the scope of an attack and take appropriate remediation steps.
Regulatory Compliance Dashboard
Maintain compliance with industry regulations and standards by leveraging the built-in compliance dashboard. Security Center maps your security posture to various compliance frameworks, such as ISO 27001, NIST SP 800-53, and PCI DSS.
Generate compliance reports to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements and identify areas needing improvement.
Integration with Azure Services
Azure Security Center integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, including:
- Azure Policy: To enforce security standards and configurations.
- Azure Sentinel: For a more comprehensive Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solution.
- Azure Monitor: To collect and analyze logs and metrics.
- Azure DevOps: For integrating security checks into your CI/CD pipelines.
Security Center Best Practices
- Enable Security Center for all your Azure subscriptions and connected accounts.
- Regularly review security recommendations and implement them promptly.
- Configure workflow automation to respond to alerts automatically.
- Integrate with Azure Sentinel for advanced threat hunting and incident response.
- Utilize the compliance dashboard to ensure adherence to relevant standards.