One day in early summer 2019, when I was sitting in my home office working on some Azure Security Center demos, my friend Mustafa sent me a message to tell me about his idea of writing a book about Azure Security. He already had an initial plan, however, he didn’t want to write the whole book on his own and so he asked me if I was interested in co-writing. Well, I was, and now I’m very excited that we are at the final stage of publishing our work within the next few weeks.
There are a lot of great books out there that cover aspects of Azure Security – books about Azure Security Center, Azure Sentinel, Azure Active Directory and all its security features. But we’ve still been missing a book that brings all of them into context. It’s not enough to protect identities but not to take care of infrastructure. It’s also not sufficient to protect networks and encrypt data, but not to have a governance strategy. This is when our latest title Mastering Azure Security comes into play.
Our idea was to write a book about all the topics which are important for security in the cloud. The result is not a technical deep dive into each and every security product, tool, and feature Microsoft Azure has to offer, but it’s more like a conceptual view on all of them. It’s a book for Azure cloud professionals, Azure architects, and security professionals who want to understand how to implement safe and secure cloud services in Microsoft Azure by combining different security tools, techniques, and principles.
Security in context
The final book mirrors real-life experience from countless Azure architecture, deployment, and security projects. If you’ve attended one of my recent conference talks about Azure Security Center, Azure Sentinel, or Identity Security, you may have realised that I bring into context different tools to explain how they make each other better. With Mastering Azure Security, we followed the same approach so we have covered the following nine topics in our book:
- Introduction to Azure Security
- Governance and Security
- Managing Cloud Identities
- Azure Network Security
- Azure Key Vault
- Data Security
- Azure Security Center
- Azure Sentinel
- Security Best Practices
In Chapter 1, Introduction to Azure Security, we explain how cloud computing is changing the concept of IT, and why security is not an exception. Cybersecurity requires a different approach in the cloud and we need to understand what the differences are, which new threats are coming up, and how to tackle them.
In Chapter 2, Governance and Security, we dive into how to create policies and rules in Microsoft Azure in order to create standards. You will learn how to enforce these policies and rules, and maintain quality levels.
Chapter 3, Managing Cloud Identities, explains why identity is one of the most important parts of security. Cloud computing brings with it that identities are way more exposed than in an onprem environment, and so we need to be extra careful when it comes to protecting them. In this chapter, you will learn how to keep identities safe and secure in Microsoft Azure, and about security principles and best practices regarding identity and access management.
Chapter 4, Azure Network Security, covers how the network is the first line of defense in any environment. Keeping resources safe and unreachable by attackers is a very important part of security. You’ll learn how to achieve this in Microsoft Azure with built-in or custom tools.
Chapter 5, Azure KeyVault, explains how to manage secrets and certificates in Azure and deploy resources with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in a secure way.
Chapter 6, Data Security, covers how to protect data in the cloud with additional encryption using Microsoft’s or your own encryption keys.
In Chapter 7, Azure Security Center, we explain why Azure Security Center is the number one tool to protect infrastructure and platform resources on Azure, and, regarding IaaS, also in other cloud platforms and even on premises. As a Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) and a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution, Azure Security Center is your one-stop shop for protecting your Azure environments.
Chapter 8, Azure Sentinel, covers how to use Azure Sentinel to monitor security for your Azure and on premises resources, including detecting threats before they happen, and using artificial intelligence to analyse and investigate them when they occur.
In Chapter 9, Security Best Practices, we finally give you some tips and tricks for Azure security, including how to set up bulletproof Azure environments, finding the hidden security features that are placed all over Azure, and other tools that may help you increase security in Microsoft Azure.
About Packt
Packt is a well-known publisher for technical books, and Mustafa already wrote several other books for the company, so it basically was a no-brainer to chose them as the company behind our joint adventure. What people from outside do not see is that writing a book can be a very challenging process because you agree to deliver every chapter after a defined period of time. Now, writing the book in our spare times meant to even have less time for our loved ones. That said, a big THANK YOU goes out to all of you! We love you and appreciate your patience with us!
All in all, writing the book for and with Packt was a great experience with a very professional team in the background who challenged us a lot, but who also gave us great support. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in this adventure. It was our pleasure!
How to get your copy
You can (pre)order the book from my Amazon author page or directly in Packt Publishing’s web shop. There also might be the opportunity to get a copy at upcoming conferences, once COVID-19 lockdowns are reduced , so stay tuned for updates on this.
Stay safe, take care, and happy reading!
Cheers,
Tom
Azure and beyond 