In our example, you assign a higher local preference value to, This configuration ensures that when both paths to Microsoft are available, users in Los Angeles connect to the. Best practice: Proxy ARP allows a firewall to extend the network at layer 2 across multiple interfaces (i.e. However, it should be avoided as much as possible. Microsoft recommends allowing Azure to manage your encryption keys, however there is the option for you to manage your own keys in some instances. To provide isolation within a virtual network, you segment it into one or more subnets, and give a portion of the virtual network's address space to each subnet. As a result, suboptimal routing can happen and your traffic might take a longer path to reach Microsoft, and Microsoft to your network. For planned maintenance, connectivity should be restored within 10 to 15 seconds. Guidance: Enable Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) multifactor authentication and follow Microsoft Defender for Cloud Identity and Access Management recommendations. They also show five-tuple information about the flow, and whether the traffic was allowed or denied. After direct RDP and SSH access from the internet is disabled, you have other options that you can use to access these VMs for remote management. A better practice is to put VMs behind Azure Load Balancer or Azure Application Gateway. Easily create hub-and-spoke and transitive architectures with native security services for traffic governance and protection. Requires multiple HTTP requests on the same long-running TCP connection to be routed or load balanced to different back-end servers. Management of core network functions like ExpressRoute, virtual network and subnet provisioning, and IP addressing. Activity logs can be used to find an error when troubleshooting or to monitor how a user in your organization modified a resource. 1. Guidance on building your own security incident response process, Microsoft Security Response Center's Anatomy of an Incident, Leverage NIST's Computer Security Incident Handling Guide to aid in the creation of your own incident response plan. Routing between subnets happens automatically, and you don't need to manually configure routing tables. In addition, you may use Azure Resource Manager templates to maintain the security configuration of your Azure Firewall and related resources required by your organization. After you've tuned your WAF, you should configure it to run in prevention mode. The hub virtual network provides a central point of connectivity to on-premises networks, and a place to host services used by workloads hosted in spoke virtual networks. You may also use Azure Blueprints to simplify large-scale Azure deployments by packaging key environment artifacts, such as Azure Resources Manager templates, Azure RBAC controls, and policies, in a single blueprint definition. To connect multiple virtual networks together, you need more name resolution capabilities. In multi-region environments, deploy an instance of Azure Firewall per region. The table shows an example of a virtual network with an address space of 10.245.16.0/20 segmented into subnets, for a planned migration. You don't have to allow direct RDP or SSH access over the internet. You can also use recommendations from Microsoft Defender for Cloud as a secure configuration baseline for your Azure resources. Share. Use Microsofts strategy and execution of Red Teaming and live site penetration testing against Microsoft-managed cloud infrastructure, services, and applications. Detail: Use CIDR-based subnetting principles to create your subnets. WAF is integrated with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. WAF provides centralized protection of your web applications from common exploits and vulnerabilities. A flow record allows an NSG to be stateful. For more information, see Azure Web Application Firewall Monitoring and Logging. 100 Azure Security best practices checklist 1. Virtual WAN allows you to connect and configure branch devices to communicate with Azure. Customers need to create a network rule to allow this access, or for a time server that you use in their environment. Guidance: Encrypt all sensitive information in transit. Your personalized Azure best practices recommendation engine. Guidance: Use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) as the central authentication and authorization system. Network security capabilities of virtual network security appliances include: To find available Azure virtual network security appliances, go to the Azure Marketplace and search for "security" and "network security.". For more information, see the Azure Security Benchmark: Secure Configuration. Azure Firewall also helps control access to on-premises networks. As you plan your network and the security of your network, we recommend that you centralize: If you use a common set of management tools to monitor your network and the security of your network, you get clear visibility into both. Explore the following table of recommendations to optimize your Azure Firewall configuration for reliability. Overlapping addresses can cause networks that can't be connected, and routing that doesn't work properly. Guidance: Use tags to assist in tracking Azure Firewall and related resources that store or process sensitive information. Azure adds a DNS server by default when you deploy a virtual network. Credential Scanner will also encourage moving discovered credentials to more secure locations such as Azure Key Vault. It should go without saying that the best strategy for how to leverage Azure policy for best practice compliance doesn't end with automating it. Azure Firewall threat intelligence-based filtering, Understand Microsoft Defender for Cloud Integrated Threat Intelligence. With Network Watcher, you can monitor and diagnose networking issues without signing in to VMs. For more information, see the Azure Security Benchmark: Network Security. Activity logs can be used to audit operations on Azure Firewall to and monitor actions on resources. As a best practice, you should use a WAF in front of any web-facing application, including applications on Azure VMs or in Azure App Service. You can measure performance statistics and metrics to troubleshoot and remediate issues quickly. Detail: Use a network security group to protect against unsolicited traffic into Azure subnets. Threat intelligence-based filtering can be enabled for your firewall to alert and deny traffic from/to-known malicious IP addresses and domains. This traffic is known as north/south traffic. You can use it with Azure ExpressRoute and route-based VPN gateways to propagate your on-premises BGP routes to your virtual networks. About permissions and groups in Azure DevOps. You can configure the next-hop address to reach specific destinations. The rules are based on a various sources including the OWASP top 10 attack types and information from Microsoft Threat Intelligence. The severity is based on how confident Microsoft Defender for Cloud is in the finding or the analytics used to issue the alert as well as the confidence level that there was malicious intent behind the activity that led to the alert. For planned maintenance or unplanned disruption to the active instance, failover occurs and the standby instance takes over automatically. You can connect Azure virtual machines (VMs) and appliances to other networked devices by placing them on Azure virtual networks. An NVA is a VM that does a network function, such as a firewall, WAN optimization, or other network function. Network security groups (NSGs) contain multiple inbound and outbound security rules that filter traffic going to and from resources. Then you migrate to an ExpressRoute connection when a physical interconnection with your service provider is established. Not all recommendations might be applicable for your deployment, so select those that work for you. Use the Azure AD PowerShell module to perform ad hoc queries to discover accounts that are members of administrative groups. Guidance: Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) has built-in roles that must be explicitly assigned and are queryable. Start with. WAF policies are the new resource type for managing your Application Gateway WAF. Azure Private Link provide the following benefits: To learn more about private endpoints and the Azure services and regions that private endpoints are available for, seeAzure Private Link. With hybrid IT, some of the company's information assets are in Azure, and others remain on-premises. This article provides architectural best practices for Azure Firewall. The Azure Security Benchmark provides recommendations on how you can secure your cloud solutions on Azure. Secure Now The tag represents the service, but not specific instances of the service. Load balancing also helps performance, because the processor, network, and memory overhead for serving requests is distributed across all the load-balanced servers. Guidance: Leverage a third-party solution from Azure Marketplace on network perimeters that monitors for unauthorized transfer of sensitive information and blocks such transfers while alerting information security professionals. The Standard option is usually enough for east-west traffic. For more information, see the Azure Security Benchmark: Identity and Access Control. Azure Firewall supports inbound and outbound filtering. More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, prepared their networking infrastructure for migration, name resolution when you use your own DNS server, overview of best practices for network security, deploy a perimeter network between Azure and your on-premises datacenter, Manage virtual machine access by using just-in-time, Allow traffic from the internet to the web servers. General best practices Enable the WAF For internet-facing applications, we recommend you enable a web application firewall (WAF) and configure it to use managed rules. An alert is enabled if a network watcher resource group is not available in a particular region. Type firewall in the search box and press Enter. By running in prevention mode, you ensure the WAF actually blocks requests that it detects are malicious. They can require rigorous maintenance, patching, and monitoring at multiple layers of the application topology. The physical separation of Availability Zones within a region protects applications and data from datacenter failures. With ExpressRoute Direct, you can connect directly to Microsoft routers at 100 Gbps, for larger bandwidth needs. How to implement Azure availability zones. For example, to manually allow Windows Update network traffic through your firewall, you would need to create multiple application rules. You can also enable a Just-In-Time / Just-Enough-Access by using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Privileged Identity Management Privileged Roles for Microsoft Services, and Azure Resource Manager. DNS forwarding also enables DNS resolution between virtual networks, and allows on-premises machines to resolve host names provided by Azure. After the point-to-site connection is established, the user can use RDP or SSH to connect to any VMs located on the Azure virtual network that the user connected to via point-to-site VPN. Migrate Azure Firewall rules to Azure Firewall Manager policies for existing deployments. How to configure customer-managed encryption keys. FQDN tags make it easy to allow known Azure service network traffic through your firewall. Use Microsoft Defender for Cloud to monitor identity and access activity. A VPN gateway can also send encrypted traffic between virtual networks in Azure over the Microsoft network. Azure policy is not fully supported for Azure Firewall at this time. Azure Advisor helps you ensure and improve the continuity of your business-critical applications. You don't need to modify your code to make use of WAF. Guidance: You have access to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Sign-in Activity, Audit and Risk Event log sources, which allow you to integrate with any SIEM/Monitoring tool. Guidance: Apply tags to Azure Firewall and related resources giving metadata to logically organize them into a taxonomy. Endpoints allow you to secure critical Azure service resources to your virtual networks only. Guidance: Build out an incident response guide for your organization. Your offices are connected on a WAN, which can be either your own backbone network or your service provider's IP VPN. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has identified that some of your subnets aren't protected with a next generation firewall. A perimeter network is where you typically enable distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention, intrusion detection/intrusion prevention systems (IDS/IPS), firewall rules and policies, web filtering, network antimalware, and more. Guidance: Implement your own process for removing unauthorized Azure Firewall and related resources. If you have older WAFs that use WAF Configuration resources, you should migrate to WAF policies to take advantage of the latest features. In the Azure Portal, search for key vaults in the search bar, and choose Key vaults under Services in the search result, as shown below. When you use a WAF and Microsoft-managed rules, your application is protected from a range of attacks. Validate whether all the associated public IP addresses are in use. The perimeter network resource can then communicate with other resources deeper in the network, moving traffic forward into the network after validation. Learn more: Learn about Azure Virtual WAN. When creating NSGs, create as few as possible, but as many as necessary. Azure Firewall supports filtering for both inbound and outbound traffic, internal spoke-to-spoke connections and hybrid connections through Azure VPN and ExpressRoute gateways. Be sure to name Application Security Groups clearly so others can understand their content and purpose. Azure Firewall must have direct internet connectivity. Accepts only a secure connection, so unencrypted communication to the server is not an acceptable option. Top 10 best practices for Azure Security in 2021; Azure Firewall vs Azure Network Security Groups (NSG) Next Task For You. For more information, see Troubleshoot Web Application Firewall (WAF) for Azure Application Gateway. For each rule, Azure multiplies ports by IP addresses. Here's an example of a single subnet perimeter network in a corporate network, with two security boundaries. You can also use activity logs for auditing operations on Azure Firewall resources. It's a fully stateful, managed firewall, with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support. Virtual networks allow for the use of 65,536 IP addresses. Guidance: Use Managed Identities to provide Azure services with an automatically managed identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Add a comment. Exploits include SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting attacks. Protect your subnets from potential threats by restricting access to them with Azure Firewall or a supported next generation firewall. Data retention can be configured from 30 to 730 days (2 years) for all workspaces depending upon the chosen pricing tier. Access control policies that focus only on who can access a resource are not enough. ARS uses BGP to communicate these routes so it is very predictable and stable. In the next section, we will be learning about the best practices and methods to create Azure Key Vault. These services might be connections to on-premises networks, firewalls, and isolation between virtual networks. When you have multiple ExpressRoute circuits, you've got more than one path to connect to Microsoft. The activity log contains all write operations (PUT, POST, DELETE) for Azure resources except read operations (GET). DNS servers in a virtual network can forward DNS queries to the recursive resolvers in Azure. This is the default recommendation. Each virtual network is isolated from other virtual networks. Guidance: Use PAWs (privileged access workstations) with multifactor authentication configured to log into and configure Azure Firewall and related resources. A Basic public IP address doesn't have an NSG automatically configured. Combine that information with other validations, such as if your instance of Azure Firewall has any rules (classic) for NAT, Network and Application, or even if the DNS Proxy setting is configured to. For new initiatives, adopt Zero Trust approaches that validate trust at the time of access. . You should review the WAF logs regularly. The content is grouped by the security controls defined by the Azure Security Benchmark and the related guidance applicable to Azure Firewall. See Azure Firewall Manager pricing. As you make design choices for Azure Firewall, review the design principles for security. Now that it's clear which prefix belongs to which Azure region, you can configure a preferred ExpressRoute circuit. Find the options that work best for you. A flow record is created for existing connections. Azure Firewall Best Practices. When you're designing security for virtual networks, it's best to: Although Microsoft invests heavily in protecting the cloud infrastructure, you must also protect your cloud services and resource groups. An FQDN tag represents a group of FQDNs associated with well-known Microsoft services. For more information, see Geomatch custom rules. Evaluate alerts based on the following list. Traffic Manager makes it possible to load balance connections to your services based on the location of the user. Azure Firewall service tags can be used in the network rules destination field and define network access controls on Azure Firewall. It generally sits between the internet and the enterprise infrastructure, usually with some form of protection on both sides. For more information, see the Azure Security Benchmark: Penetration Tests and Red Team Exercises. You must enable the DNS Proxy option to use FQDNs in your network rules. Follow Microsoft Defender for Cloud recommendations for encryption at rest and encryption in transit, where applicable. ExpressRoute uses BGP to exchange routes between on-premises networks, Azure instances, and Microsoft public addresses. Azure Policy definitions will be listed in the Regulatory Compliance section of the Microsoft Defender for Cloud dashboard. User access can be reviewed on a regular basis to make sure only the right Users have continued access. Public IP addresses allow internet resources to communicate inbound to Azure resources, and Azure resources to communicate outbound to the internet. For more complex network topologies, you might use security products from Microsoft partners, in particular network virtual appliances (NVAs). Your WAN network can assume that both prefixes are closer to, You assign a unique BGP community value to each Azure region. Application rule logs are created when each new connection that matches one of your configured application rules results in a log for the accepted/denied connection. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an optional feature. The Azure ExpressRoute service extends your on-premises infrastructure into the Microsoft cloud. 4. For more information, see the reference links below. 2. Azure Monitor logs is best used for general real-time monitoring of your application or looking at trends. You can configure your own, and assign rules to control access. ExpressRoute connections offer higher security, reliability, and higher speeds (up to 10 Gbps), along with consistent latency. NSG rules are evaluated by priority by using five-tuple information to allow or deny the traffic. Load-balancing option: Use Azure Application Gateway, an HTTP web traffic load balancer. Azure Firewall also provides diagnostic logs to provide information on customer applications and network rules. You create an application rule and use the Windows Update tag. Virtual machines connected to an Azure virtual network can connect to devices on the same virtual network, different virtual networks, the internet, or your own on-premises networks. It's possible to reach Azure virtual machines by using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, full Azure Firewall security baseline mapping file, Azure Security Benchmark: Network Security, Understand Network Security provided by Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Defender for Cloud's recommendations, All Internet traffic should be routed via your deployed Azure Firewall, Azure DDoS Protection Standard should be enabled, Azure Security Benchmark: Logging and Monitoring, Azure Security Benchmark: Identity and Access Control, Learn more about Privileged Identity Management, How to configure Named Locations in Azure, How to create and configure an Azure AD instance, How to integrate Azure Activity Logs into Azure Monitor, Azure Security Benchmark: Data Protection, Understand customer data protection in Azure, Understand encryption in transit with Azure, How to create alerts for Azure Activity Log events, Azure Security Benchmark: Inventory and Asset Management, How to configure Conditional Access to block access to Azure Resources Manager, Azure Security Benchmark: Secure Configuration, Azure Security Benchmark: Incident Response, NIST's publication - Guide to Test, Training, and Exercise Programs for IT Plans and Capabilities, How to set the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Security Contact, How to configure Workflow Automation and Logic Apps, Azure Security Benchmark: Penetration Tests and Red Team Exercises. Note: Both logs can be saved to a storage account, streamed to Event hubs and/or sent to Azure Monitor logs only if enabled for each Azure Firewall in an environment. When you tune your WAF for your application workload, you typically create a set of rule exclusions to reduce false positive detections. After you enable service endpoints in your virtual network, you can secure Azure service resources by adding a virtual network rule to the service resources. Review underutilized Azure Firewall instances. Azure security groups is a feature of VNet that describe firewall rules on the subnets in Azure. Reconcile inventory on a regular basis and ensure unauthorized resources are deleted from the subscription in a timely manner. Application security groups enable you to configure network security as a natural extension of an application structure. Because you're using BGP to exchange routing information, you can use BGP's local preference to influence routing. You may also make use of built-in policy definitions related to your specific resources. Intelligent Security Graph powers Microsoft threat intelligence and is used by multiple services, including Microsoft Defender for Cloud. In such situations, we recommend that you deploy virtual network security appliances provided by Azure partners. Because the DNS suffix is different in each virtual network, you can use conditional forwarding rules to send DNS queries to the correct virtual network for resolution. They can be analyzed in Log Analytics or by different tools such as Excel and Power BI. Best practices for logically segmenting subnets include: Best practice: Don't assign allow rules with broad ranges (for example, allow 0.0.0.0 through 255.255.255.255). Guidance: Use Azure DevOps to securely store and manage your code like custom Azure policies, Azure Resource Manager templates. Best practices for using Key Vault 1. When you're deciding on network range for subnets, Azure keeps five IP addresses from each subnet that can't be used. Azure Firewall versus Network Virtual Appliances Best Practices for implementing Network Security: Use strong network controls Logically segment subnets Adopt a Zero Trust approach Control routing behavior Deploy perimeter networks for security zones Avoid exposure to the internet with dedicated WAN links Optimize uptime and performance Any advice would be much appreciated. Use security partner providers for third-party SECaaS offerings. Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. 1. 6.2.0 Download PDF Copy Link Best practices This FortiGate Best Practices document is a collection of guidelines to ensure the most secure and reliable operation of FortiGate units in a customer environment. For example RDP, SSH, and FTP protocols. Configure an Azure Firewall subnet (AzureFirewallSubnet) with a /26 address space. You can enable forced tunneling to route Internet-bound traffic to an additional firewall or virtual network appliance. Here are a few points to be aware of if you deploy the service: Web applications are increasingly targets of malicious attacks that exploit commonly known vulnerabilities. Azure accelerated networking support: Consider a virtual appliance that is available on one of the supported VM types with Azure's accelerated networking capability. Each layer can include a combination of the network security solutions, such as: Intrusion detection and intrusion protection systems (IDS/IPS). You can configure endpoint connections on virtual networks for virtual machines (VMs) and services that require internet communication. If you'll need more than 512,000 SNAT ports, deploy a NAT gateway with Azure Firewall. To secure virtual networks, consider attack vectors. If you manually configure these exclusions by using the Azure portal, then when you upgrade your WAF to use a newer ruleset version, you need to reconfigure the same exceptions against the new ruleset version. When you're creating Azure Firewall rules, it's best to use the FQDN tags. For more information, see Manage access to Azure management with Conditional Access. If they aren't in use, disassociate and delete them. Set alerts as needed to get notifications after reaching a threshold for any metric. You create a local network gateway on-premises, and configure your on-premises VPN device. Delegate incremental firewall policies to local security teams through RBAC. NVAs bolster virtual network security and network functions. Hybrid Cloud Data Center, Network Perimeter, Next-Generation Firewalls, Zero Trust Security. The first and simplest way to build a DMZ in Azure is to use network security groups (NSGs).