Specify security baselines for IaaS services
In most infrastructure as a service (IaaS) scenarios, Azure virtual machines (VMs) are the main workload for organizations that use cloud computing. This fact is 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.
The first step in protecting your VMs is to ensure that only authorized users can set up new VMs and access VMs. To improve the security of Linux VMs on Azure, you can integrate with Azure AD authentication. When you use Azure AD authentication for Linux VMs, you centrally control and enforce policies that allow or deny access to the VMs.
Security baseline for IaaS VMs
Security baselines for IaaS VMs are available for Windows and Linux. While each operating system will have its own security settings, there are some general guidelines that you can ensure are in place regardless of the operating system, such as:
Protect your virtual machines from viruses and malware: if you are using Windows, you can use the Microsoft Antimalware for Azure, which is a single-agent solution for applications and tenant environments. It's designed to run in the background without human intervention. You can deploy protection based on the needs of your application workloads, with either basic secure-by-default or advanced custom configuration, including antimalware monitoring. For Linux you can use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) for Linux.
Encrypt your sensitive data: you can use Azure Disk Encryption for encrypting your Windows and Linux virtual machine disks. Azure Disk Encryption uses the industry-standard BitLocker feature of Windows and the dm-crypt feature of Linux to provide volume encryption for the OS and the data disks. The solution is integrated with Azure Key Vault to help you control and manage the disk encryption keys and secrets in your key vault subscription. It ensures that all data in the virtual machine disks are encrypted at rest in Azure Storage.
Secure network traffic: use Azure virtual network to control traffic. An Azure virtual network is a logical construct built on top of the physical Azure network fabric. Each logical Azure virtual network is isolated from all other Azure virtual networks. This isolation helps ensure that network traffic in your deployments is not accessible to other Microsoft Azure customers.
Identify and detect threats: you can use Microsoft Defender for Servers threat detection which is available for Windows and Linux. This plan offers threat detection and it integrates with MDE (for Windows and Linux).
Security baselines for VMs are accessible via Defender for Cloud recommendations. Each operating system has its own recommendation as shown below:
As you open each recommendation, you'll see the security checks that were performed, and when you select a security check, you'll see more details about the impact, the vulnerability and remediation as shown below:
Need help? See our troubleshooting guide or provide specific feedback by reporting an issue.