Security Best Practices for Developing Windows Azure Applications

By Mark Estberg, Senior Director of Risk and Compliance, Global Foundation Services 
 
Security challenges exist in the cloud and applications must take these challenges into account.

Our team recently collaborated with other security experts to publish a white paper which describes these challenges and recommend approaches to design and develop more secure applications for Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. The Windows Azure provides Platform as a Service capabilities that give developers flexibility and access to highly scalable compute and storage.

I would like to thank Microsoft’s Security Engineering Center and Online Services Security and Compliance teams that worked to provide this paper which builds on the security principles that the company has developed through years of experience managing security risks in traditional development and our large scale operating environment.

We hope that by sharing our best practices that we can help others in the industry provide a more secure cloud computing experience and develop common standards for those practices to benefit customers globally.

The paper can be found via this link.