How to choose an Azure Managed Service Provider: Cloud Security

In this two-part series, you’ll learn about some important things to think through when looking for and selecting a managed service provider partner for Microsoft Azure. In part 1, we talked about types of cloud licenses and support. Next up, let’s talk about important considerations for maintaining a secure cloud computing environment.

How to look after the security of your cloud services?

Security is a significant concern when migrating to the cloud. It is crucial that you keep sensitive data and your business-critical applications secured and protected. It’s also important to understand your compliance and legal position with many industries and countries governed by strict regulations.

To maintain a strong security levels, your cloud infrastructure must be protected from unauthorised access or attacks, and this means regularly applying the latest security updates, as well as having robust identity and access management practices. Should security breaches occur, it’s important to have plans in place to respond quickly to mitigate them.

Given the complexity of implementing security in the cloud, more and more organisations are turning to managed services providers (MSPs) for help. However, this decision comes with a certain level of risk as you will need to provide your MSP with access to your infrastructure, data, and applications. Because of this, it’s important to ensure that the MSP you’re working with has robust security measures of their own.

What to look for in an MSP in terms of security measures?

At SoftwareOne we take security extremely seriously.

Whenever we access a customer’s cloud environment, either under the CSP programme or otherwise, we do so with the least privilege access on a time-limited basis. All the access credentials you provide us with are secured using industry best practices, including multi-factor authentication and secure password vaults.

As part of our Microsoft CSP offering, we will monitor your Azure environment for unauthorised use, using fraud and spend controls that we jointly developed with Microsoft. And if you need more help, our Azure advanced managed service can help you improve your security posture further and align with industry standards, such as CIS and NIST. We will also look after your infrastructure, ensuring your VMs are always up to date with the latest security levels.

Finally, our Microsoft Sentinel managed detection and response service continuously monitors your environment for security threats. When they are discovered, our team of experts will respond and mitigate the risk. And because Sentinel is based on machine learning (ML) models, it’s always improving, reducing the number of false positives.