I believe it's important to understand the
why behind watching this course. I mean,
what is the end game we are trying to
achieve here? The reason behind learning
about Azure Security Center and all of its
features. Only then, we can start mapping
each feature set in Azure Security Center
with a specific need and business or
security value, at least this is how I
like to learn about new things. You might
agree with me that many organizations
start migrating or deploying resources to
the cloud without proper compliance,
security, or governance in mind. In fact,
I see many organizations do this. They try
to copy the same network layout they have
on-premises to the cloud, they deploy the
same on-premises security tools and agents
to their cloud infrastructure, and they
perhaps assume security is mainly the
cloud provider's responsibility. Now the
reality is that the cloud is a new
playground with its own rules and unique
nature. The examples of things that are
left undetermined are the incident
response plan in the cloud, the encryption
used, and the security monitoring. Not
understanding these factors means you are
taking on unknown levels of risk that you
may not even comprehend. Instead, a better
way of carrying security practices to the
cloud is to think about security from a
holistic standpoint. It requires taking
advantage of the built-in security
capabilities available in the cloud
platform and perhaps change the way
networks in the cloud are separated to
achieve best security scores. It can be a
great opportunity, of course, for you to
rethink how you want to deliver various
workloads and services with security in
mind using all the abstractions and
orchestration capabilities that are not
feasible otherwise on-premises. In fact,
the cloud comes with some security
challenges as well. We all know how
quickly you can build a complete
environment in Azure just by running an
Azure template. The question you should
ask yourself is, how can you ensure these
new resources are protected and monitored
from the moment they were created? Keep
also in mind that the lifespan of servers
can be less than an hour in case of a
scale set, for example, so how can you get
visibility and control over such dynamic
cloud environment? Another point I want to
mention here is that in large
organizations, the problem becomes more
difficult due to the dispersed cloud
adoption strategy. You might have some
departments that are adopting the cloud
faster than other departments, and they
end up spinning a couple of applications
in the cloud without even the security
team's knowledge, and they might be using
legacy tools to gain visibility of their
cloud resources. Now it is obvious that
the endless journey to obtain the right
level of visibility and control over the
cloud resources is still a challenge.
According to Palo Alto Networks' report,
the top two security control challenges
SecOps are struggling with are visibility
in infrastructure security and compliance.
Now I hope you agree with me that you
should be prepared as a security
professional when adopting and migrating
workloads to the cloud to overcome these challenges.