Introduction

  • 3 minutes

You can use the Azure Security Center to assess the security configuration of your Azure VM resources and the Windows Server operating system (OS) that's running on the VM.

Scenario

Contoso is a medium-size financial services company in London with a branch office in New York. Most of its compute environment runs on-premises on Windows Server. This includes virtualized workloads on Windows Server 2012 R2 hosts. Contoso IT staff are in the process of migrating Contoso servers to Windows Server 2019.

Contoso’s IT director realizes that Contoso has an outdated operational model with limited automation and reliance on dated technology. The Contoso IT Engineering team has started exploring Azure capabilities. They want to determine whether Azure services might assist with modernizing the current operational model through automation and virtualization.

As part of the initial design, the Contoso IT team asked you, their lead system engineer and server administrator, to set up a proof of concept environment. This environment must verify whether Azure services can help to modernize the IT infrastructure and meet business goals.

Securing VM resources both in Azure and on-premises is important to the IT staff at Contoso. In this module, you'll learn about Azure Security Center and how to enable it in hybrid environments. You'll learn how to onboard Windows Server computers to Security Center, and how to use it to protect your resources. You'll also learn about Azure Sentinel, security information and event management (SIEM), and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR).

Learning objectives

After completing this module, you will be able to:

  • Describe Azure Security Center.
  • Enable Azure Security Center in hybrid environments.
  • Onboard Windows Server computers to Azure Security Center.
  • Implement and assess security policies.
  • Describe Azure Sentinel.
  • Implement SIEM and SOAR.
  • Protect your resources with Azure Security Center.

Prerequisites

In order to get the best learning experience from this module, it's important that you have knowledge and experience of the following:

  • Managing Windows Server operating system and Windows Server workloads in on-premises scenarios, including Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Domain Name System (DNS), the Distributed File System (DFS), Microsoft Hyper-V, and file and storage services
  • Common Windows Server management tools
  • Core Microsoft compute, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies
  • On-premises resiliency Windows Server–based compute and storage technologies
  • Implementing and managing ​​infrastructure as a service (IaaS) services in Azure
  • Microsoft Entra ID
  • Security-related technologies (firewalls, encryption, multi-factor authentication)
  • Windows PowerShell scripting
  • Automation and monitoring