Azure security best practices and patterns

For years, Microsoft Azure has been a widely used platform for many types of cloud computing. Azure DevOps Services, in particular, offer precise services to developers and other DevOps teams, integrating neatly into an organization’s software distribution chain and overall existence. Incorporating security into DevOps has been complex because of conventional security approaches’ inability to keep up with DevOps’ rapidity and agility. DevSecOps is a concept dedicated to creating and implementing contemporary security approaches capable of keeping up with DevOps.

Azure includes a security center that assists in evaluating application security requirements. The Azure Security Center is the throbbing core of Azure security. Any security-related information you need is likely to be found in some aspect of the security center, even if not in the dashboard. Several security features are enabled by default, so if you keep a virtual machine operating for an extended period, you will most likely notice notifications. Furthermore, in the Azure Security Center, you can evaluate resource compliance with policies and create a list of actions that need to be accomplished to enhance compliance.

Security must always be the priority in any cloud-based system. Today, we’ll go over several best practices for safeguarding your code within the Azure DevOps platform, so you can get the most out of the service without putting your code in danger. They include:

Visibility of the Organization and the Project

Azure DevOps offers two primary ways for managing project visibility:

A “Visibility” setting may be located at the top end of your project settings via the Overview menu item in the General section. Here, you may select between public and private visibility:

Second, you may block public projects entirely at the organizational level by going to Organization Settings and selecting Policies. Switch the option to “Off” to disable “Allow public projects," which would disable support for all projects within the business.

Encrypt your Data at rest to Keep it Safe

By default, data saved in Azure DevOps is encrypted. This implies that only you have significant exposure to the encryption key and that neither Microsoft nor anyone else can decode your data, and you can better secure your data by encrypting it using a client key.

It would be best if you first built an Azure Key Vault before you can encrypt your data at rest in Azure DevOps. Then, add your client keys to the Key Vault before enabling encryption for your Azure DevOps account.

Activating encryption for your Azure DevOps account is a straightforward operation, but before you do so, be sure you fully understand the security consequences. Before enabling encryption for your device, talk with your security team.

Disable Forking

Forking is the process of generating a clone of a repository to provide developers with a secure environment to practice with code without impacting the source.

From a security standpoint, there are two significant difficulties with forking. First, the more forks in a repo, the more difficult it is to maintain track of every fork’s security. The more forks there are in a repo, the more complicated it becomes. Finally, users may quickly fork and save a repository to their account.The repository settings of the project can be used to disable forking. Simply choose the repository and turn off the “Forks” setting.

Turn on Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)

Even if an intruder obtains a user’s password with MFA enabled, they will be unable to log in without also having access to the user’s second factor of authentication, which might be a code from a hardware token or a one-time password (OTP) created by a mobile phone app.

Activating MFA offers an additional layer of protection to your Azure DevOps environment and should be a recommended practice for all users, particularly those with administrator responsibilities.