Webinar Azure Security for Architects and Engineers - Building Secure Solutions on Azure

The day will begin with a quick overview of the content that was covered on Day 1. Before we dive into the details, it helps to understand the bigger picture, and the why behind the how.

In this workshop, we will learn how a Zero Trust Architecture mindset affects us as application developers. We will discuss authentication protocols and how to use them for your apps. Then, we will extend this to Managed Identities and see how we can work towards a ‘password-less’ and ‘secret-less’ distributed application landscape. We will also discuss to what extent these options can be used in a hybrid scenario. After this workshop, you will understand what it means to develop apps using identity as the perimeter. 

We will not always be able to avoid having to handle secrets in our application. Think certificates, signing keys, connection strings to on-premise workloads, and more. These secrets should be handled with the utmost care. In this workshop, we will learn about Azure Key Vault. We will connect to it from our app, but we will also explore some of its other uses, such as a secret store for our CI/CD pipelines and handling the certificate lifecycle. After this workshop, you will understand the role of Key Vault in several secret-handling scenarios.

The Zero Trust Architecture mindset also implies that we use network-level controls for proper segmentation. Traditionally, most developers have never had to worry too much about the network, but in a modern self-service devops environment, it really helps to understand the basics. In this workshop, we will cover those basics: we will dive into Azure Virtual Networks, and all the mechanisms available to either grant or deny access from one network segment to the next. Armed with this knowledge, we will be able to lock down our application that we control both the inbound and outbound data flows. After this workshop, you will understand the basics of Azure Networking, and the tools available to effectively segment the network.

On top of network segmentation and some basic access control mechanisms, we also have a collection of more sophisticated services in Azure to provide security features at the network level. In this workshop, we will explore these services, and get a feel for the differences between Web Application Firewall and Azure Firewall, or learn how to combine Azure Application Gateway with Azure API Management; or how these can help enable hybrid scenarios.
After this workshop, you will know when to use which firewall and/or gateway.

To close off the day, we will explore some of the options available for devops engineers to proactively respond to threats. Using Azure Monitor, we can monitor for and automatically respond to any abnormal event or incident. With Azure Sentinel, we can do the same – and more, using the Machine Learning-powered threat analysis algorithms it provides. After this workshop, you will understand the basics of pro-active threat mitigation in Azure.