Best practices for Azure VM security

When working with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) scenarios, Azure virtual machines (VMs) are the main compute workload for organizations that use cloud computing. This fact is especially evident in hybrid scenarios where organizations want to slowly migrate workloads to the cloud. In such scenarios, follow the general security considerations for IaaS, and apply security best practices to all your VMs.

If you want to go deeper, Microsoft has published guidance on VM security best practices based on a consensus of opinion, and they work with current Azure platform capabilities and feature sets.

The guidance covers key VM security best practices, including:

• VM authentication and access control

• VM availability and network access

• Protect data at rest in VMs by enforcing encryption

• Manage your VM updates

• Manage your VM security posture

• Monitor VM performance

If you are responsible for the IaaS in Azure for your company, its worth using this guidance as a baseline... and then consider applying Azure Monitoring and tying back to the Azure Security Center.