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Intro to Azure Security Center

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This post is the first part of a of series about Azure Security Center

Introduction

In this post series, we will talk about one of the most important services on Azure, the Azure Security Center. Throughout this post, we will read what Azure Security Center is, what are the licensing tiers, how we can enable and use the security functionalities that it offers. Azure Security Center is a unified monitor security management platform across our cloud, on-premises and hybrid workloads. We can achieve this security for our workloads by using security policies, advanced analytics reports, security alerts, threat prevention, JIT access, etc.

Licensing Tiers

Azure Security Center has two tier offerings:

  • Free: The Free tier is by default enable to all Azure Subscriptions and it provides security assessment, policy and recommendations.
  • **Standard: **The Standard tier provides more security functionalities, like regulatory compliance, Just in time VM access, threat protection for PaaS and IaaS, adaptive application controls.

In the table below we can see what  Standard tier provides in contrast to Free.

Functionality Free Standard
Continuous assessment and security recommendations Yes Yes
Azure Secure Score Yes Yes
Adaptive application Controls and network hardening No Yes
Threat protection for supported PaaS services No Yes
Regulatory compliance dashboard and reports No Yes
Threat protection for Azure VMs and non-Azure  servers (including Server EDR) No Yes
Just in time  VM Access No Yes
Microsoft Defender ATP for Servers No Yes

Licensing Costs

Resource Type Standard Tier
Virtual Machine Server/hour
App Services App Service/hour
SQL Database Server/hour
Storage €0.018/Server/hour
IoT Devices - by device €0.0009/month
IoT Devices - by messages €0.169/25K transactions
Azure Kubernetes Services vCore/hour
Azure Container Registry Per image
Key Vaults 10K transactions

 For more details please check this document.

Supported environments

Azure Security Center supports the following Cloud and Hybrid environments:

  • Only Azure
  • Azure and on-premises
  • Azure and other clouds
  • Azure, other clouds, and on-premises

Azure Security Center Modules Overview

Policy & Compliance

Resource Security Hygiene

Advanced Cloud Defence