Storage security (part 1)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 


To read part 2 please click here

Data Sovereignty

Data sovereignty is the concept that information which has been converted and stored in binary digital form is subject to the laws of the country or region in which it is located. Most of the current concerns that surrounds data sovereignty relate to enforcing privacy regulations and preventing data that is stored in a foreign country or region from being subpoenaed by the host country or the region's government.

In Azure, the customer data might be replicated within a selected geographic area for enhanced data durability in case of a major data center disaster, and in some cases will not be replicated outside it.

Paired regions

Azure operates in multiple geographies around the world. Each Azure region is paired with the another region within the same geography, forming the regional pair (except Brazil South). It is recommended to configure Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) across regional pairs to benefit from Azure's isolation and VM policies. Using both regions in a regional pair where ever possible for the applications that supports the multiple active regions, will ensure optimal availability for applications and minimized recovery time in the event of a disaster.

Benefits of the Azure paired regions

  • Physical isolation- When ever possible, Azure services prefers at least 300 miles of separation between datacenters in a regional pair. Isolation is subject to the constraints within the geography, such as geography size, power, and network infrastructure availability, and regulations.

  • Platform-provided replication- Some services such as geo-redundant storage provide automatic replication to the paired region.

  • Region recovery order- In the event of a broad outage, recovery of one region is prioritized out of every pair. Applications that are deployed across paired regions are guaranteed to have one of the regions recovered with priority, but if they are not paired, then the recovery might be delayed. In the worst case the chosen regions might be the last two to be recovered.

  • Sequential updates- Planned Azure system updates are rolled out to paired regions sequentially, not at the same time, which helps minimize downtime, the effect of bugs, and logical failures in the rare event of a bad update.

  • Data residency- To meet the data residency requirements for tax and law enforcement jurisdiction purposes, a region resides within the same geography as its pair (except Brazil South).  

Microsoft also complies with the international data protection laws regarding transfers of the customer data across borders. It will not transfer to any third party (not even for storage purposes) the data that you provide to Microsoft through the use of business cloud services, and that are covered under the Microsoft Online Services Terms.

Note- No matter where the customer data is stored, Microsoft does not control or limit the locations from the customers, or their end users might access their data.  

Azure Storage Access

Overview of Access Control for Storage Account

Every request made against a secured resource in the Blob, Fire, Queue, or Table service must be authorized which ensures that the resources in your storage account are accessible only when you want them to be, and only to those users or applications to whom you grant access.

Options for authorizing requests to Azure Storage includes:

  • Azure AD- Azure Storage provides integration with Azure AD for identity-based authorization of requests to the Blob and Queue services. When you use Azure AD to authorize requests made from your applications, you avoid having to store your account access key with your code, as you do with the Shared Key authorization. While you can continue to use Shared Key authorization with your blob and queue applications, Microsoft recommends moving to Azure AD where ever possible.

  • Azure AD Domain Services authorization for Azure files- Azure Files supports identity-based authorization over Server Message Block (SMB) through Azure AD DS. You can use RBAC for fine-grained control over a client's access to Azure Files resources in a storage account. 

  • Shared key- This authorization relies on your account access keys and other parameters to produce an encrypted signature string that is passed on via request in the Authorization header.

  • Share access signatures (SAS)- It is a URI that grants restricted access rights to the Azure Storage resources. You can provide an SAS to the client who should not be trusted with your storage account key but to whom you wish to delegate access to certain storage account resources. A client who is in possession of the SAS can make a request against Azure Storage with just the SAS URI, and the information contained in the SAS token is used to authorize the request.

  • Anonymous access to containers and blobs- You can enable anonymous, public read access to a container and its blobs in the Azure Blob Storage. Public read access is the best for the scenarios where you want certain blobs to always be available for anonymous read access. For more fine-grained control, look to using the shared access signature described above.  

Authenticating and authorizing access to blob and queue data with Azure AD provides superior security and ease of use over other authorization options. Where ever possible use authorizing applications that access Azure Storage using Azure AD. It provides better security and ease of use over other authorization options.


To read part 2 please click here





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