Sidelining threats with Azure Active Directory

Having a fool-proof security system isn't enough to protect your organization from cyber threats. Even though there are plenty of tools available that detect threats and notify the security teams to take significant measures, you still need to make your applications secure and threat free. Further, your identity management system, whether it is on-premises or in cloud, happens to be one of the potential targets for the intruders. The fact that all the important information of the organization is accessed via the system, preparators have this tendency to break in the same. Hence, it is important to draft significant measures to secure the system and ensure that it is threat free.

According to a study conducted by PwC (Price Waterhouse Coopers), 51% of the 10,000 global CSOs and CIOs have been able to analyze and monitor threat intelligence solutions for risk detection. Most cloud platforms offer services around security, threat intelligence, risk management and many more. Microsoft Azure provides advanced threat detection built-in functionalities through services like Azure Active Directory, Azure Security Centre, Azure Sentinel, Azure Monitor logs and few more. You can secure any deployments whether on-premise applications or Azure applications quickly in a simple way by leveraging such services.

Azure Active Directory is an enterprise identity service that offers multi-factor authentication and single sign-on features. This helps in protecting your app users from up to 99.9% of cybersecurity attacks. It offers identity protection that gives an overview of potential vulnerabilities and risk detections, which may affect the identities of an organization. Implementing threat intelligence in your existing or new system isn't anything you do on the go, instead, you have to have a fool proof strategy & implementation before making the call. Let’s dive into it.

Adopt Conditional Access in Active Directory environment

As you know that your business application enables users across the globe to access data from anywhere and any device. Given the above, the data stored in such directories turn vulnerable to hacks as not all devices are secured. This is where you need to adopt conditional access in an Azure AD environment. What this does is outline a set of policies governing the usage and accessibility rights of the user.

As a matter of fact, Azure consultants set-up the Azure active Directory environment and integrate this service, where the admin can configure all the policies based on the location, user groups, device platform, device status, client application, etc.

Put Machine Learning to use for Anomaly Detection

If your application is running on Azure and the huge repository of your data gets stored in Azure, then you can use that data further to detect and identify potential threats. It can be used to paint patterns that showcase normal activity within the organization and then, the same is compared to trace anomalies. Behavioural analytics using Machine Learning is an excellent way to trace gaps in security and detect unusual events.

Once the detection is done, you next need to block all of those unwanted and illegal users from revisiting your network and breaching security. For instance, you can perform a security check at the IP addresses used to send emails. If it changes, or if threat intelligence platform reports a mismatch, you know your security is being compromised.