Getting Started with Azure Sentinel (part 3 of 4)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



To read part 1, please click here
To read part 2, please click here
To read part 4, please click here




Cloud Platform Integrations

As Azure Sentinel can protect your cloud platform deployments, so that instead of sending logs from the cloud provider to an on-premises SIEM solution, you can keep data off your local network to save bandwidth as well as storage costs. Following platforms can be integrated with Azure Sentinel:

Integrating with AWS

As AWS can offer API access to most of the features across the platform, it allows Azure Sentinel a rich integration solution. The following enabled resources should be integrated with Azure Sentinel:

  1. AWS Cloud Trail logs have insights into AWS user activities, like failed sign-in attempts, IP addresses, regions, user agents, identity types as well as potential malicious user activities with assumed roles.
  2. AWS Cloud Trail logs have network related resource activities too, like the creation, update, and deletions of security groups, network Access Control Lists (ACLs) and routes, gateways, elastic load balancers, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), subnets, and network interfaces.  

Integrating with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

It can also provide API access to most features, but its not an extraordinary solution to integrate with Azure Sentinel. Hence while managing GCP instance along with Azure Sentinel, you have to consider following options:
  • REST API- Currently this feature is under development, but once released, you will be able to create your own investigation queries. 
  • Deploy a CASB solution that can interact with GCP logs, control session access, and forward relevant information to Azure Sentinel.
  • Deploy a log collector like Syslog, CEF, or LogStash and make sure that all the deployed resources can forward their logs through log collector to Azure Sentinel.    

Integrating with Microsoft Azure 

Microsoft Azure platform can have direct integration with other Microsoft security solutions which are being added every month:
  • Azure AD can accumulate insights about app usage, conditional access policies, legacy authentication, self-service password reset, and management of users, groups, roles as well as apps; to collect sign-in logs and audit.

  • Azure AD Identity Protection can readily offer the capability of instant risk remediation to users and sign-in risk events as well as vulnerabilities.

  • Azure ATP to secure Active Directory domains and forests.

  • Azure Information Protection can classify and optionally protect sensitive information.

  • Azure Security Center is a CWPP for Azure and hybrid deployments.

  • DNS analytics can improve investigations for the clients who want to resolve malicious domain names, talkative DNS clients, and other DNS health-related events.

  • Microsoft Cloud App Security will be getting visibility into connected cloud apps and analysis of firewall logs. 

  • Microsoft Defender ATP is an security platform designed to prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

  • Microsoft Web App Firewall (WAF) can easily secure applications from common web vulnerabilities.

  • Microsoft Office 365 offers a view into user's activities like file downloads, access requests, changes to group events, and mailbox activity. 

  • Microsoft Threat Intelligence Platform is used to integrate with the Microsoft Graph Security API data sources, can send threat indicators from Microsoft and third-party threat intelligence platforms.

  • It is recommended to have Windows Firewalls on your servers and desktop computers.   

It is strongly recommended to consider deploying CWPP solution to offer extra security against misconfiguration and compliance violations which can further send events to Azure Sentinel for central reporting, alerting as well as remediation.

Private Infrastructure Integration

Initially, you can easily integrate with your private infrastructure by simply deploying Syslog servers as data collectors and you can manage large log data volume easily by transmitting that data over your internet connections (or private connections like ExpressRoute). 

The load can also be reduced by filtering the data of the configured data collectors while also maintaining the balance between volume and velocity of the collected data to ensure the sufficient availability of bandwidth so that data can be sent to Azure Sentinel easily. 

Secondly, you can also integrate by just investigating and automating your actions to thoroughly understand and remediate all the issues where automation means the deployment of Azure Automation to run scripts, or through third-party solution integration, depending on the managed resources.

However, as soon as your private infrastructure looses internet connectivity, all of your systems will not be able to communicate with Azure Sentinel during the outage, hence you should also consider your investments in redundancy and fault tolerance.   




To read part 1, please click here
To read part 2, please click here
To read part 4, please click here













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