Category Archives: Microsoft Azure

How to control the execution of applications using Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center provides several mechanisms to prevent security threats and reduce the attack surfaces of your environment. One of these mechanisms is theAdaptive Application Controls, a solution that can control which applications are running on the systems. Azure Security Center uses the machine learning engine to analyze applications running on virtual machines and leverages artificial intelligence to provide a list of allowed applications. This article lists the benefits that can be achieved by adopting this solution and how to perform the configuration.

Adopting this solution, available using the tier Standard of Azure Security Center, you can do the following:

  • Be alerted to attempts to run malicious applications, that may potentially not be detected by antimalware solutions. For Windows systems on Azure, you can also apply execution locks.
  • Respect corporate compliance, allowing the execution of only licensed software.
  • Avoid using unwanted or obsolete software in your infrastructure.
  • Control access to sensitive data that takes place using specific applications.

Figure 1 – Azure Security Center Free vs Standard Tier

Adaptive application controls can be used on systems regardless of their geographic location. Currently for systems not located in Azure and Linux VMs, only audit mode is supported.

This feature can be activated directly from the portal by accessing the Azure Security Center.

Figure 2 – Adaptive application controls in the "Advanced cloud defense" of Security Center

Security Center uses a proprietary algorithm to automatically create groups of machines with similar characteristics, to help enforce Application Control policies.

From the management interface, the groups are divided into three types:

  • Configured: list groups containing VMs where this feature is configured.
  • Recommended: there are groups of systems where enabling application control is recommended. Security Center uses machine learning mechanisms to identify VMs on which the same applications are always regularly running, and therefore are good candidates to enable application control.
  • Unconfigured: list of groups that contain the VMs for which there are no specific recommendations regarding the application control. For example, VMs that systematically run different applications.

Figure 3 – Types of groups

By clicking on the groups of virtual machines, you will be able to manage the Application control rules, that will allow you to create rules that evaluate the execution of applications.

Figure 4 – Configuring Application control rules

For each individual rule, you select the machines on which to apply it and the applications that you want to allow. For each application, the detail information is provided, in particular, the "Expoitable" column indicates whether it is an application that can potentially be used maliciously to bypass the list of allowed applications. For this type of application, you should pay close attention before allowing.

This configuration, for Windows systems, involves creating specific rules inApplocker, and it govern the execution of applications.

By default, Security Center enables application control in modeAudit, only to control activity on protected virtual machines without applying any locks on application execution. For each individual group, after verifying that the configuration you have made does not result in any malfunctions on the workloads on the systems, you can bring application control to application mode Enforce, as long as they are Windows virtual machines in the Azure environment, to block the execution of applications that are not expressly allowed. You can always change the name of the group from the same interface.

Figure 5 – Change the name and protection mode

At the end of this configuration, you will see, in the main Security Center panel, notifications concerning potential violations in the execution of applications than allowed.

Figure 6 - Violation notifications of applications Securiy Center

Figure 7 – Full list of the violations found

Figure 8 - Sample of violation

Conclusions

The functionality of Adaptive application controls allows with few easy steps to quickly enable a thorough check on the applications that run on systems. The configuration is simple and intuitive, especially thanks to functionality that allows to group the systems that have similar characteristics with regard to the execution of the application. It is therefore an important mechanism that helps prevent potential security threats and to minimize the attack surfaces of the environment. Added to the additional features, Adaptive application controls helps make Security Center a complete solution for the protection of workloads.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (October 2019 – Weeks: 41 and 42)

This series of blog posts includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft in the last two weeks.

Azure

Azure DNS private zones is now generally available

Azure DNS private zones is now production ready and backed by Azure DNS SLA. Azure DNS private zones provide reliable, secure DNS service to host, resolve and manage domain names from a virtual network without the need to add a custom DNS solution.  Azure DNS private zones enables you to effortlessly tailor your DNS namespace design to best suit your organization’s needs without having to worry about scalability, security and performance issues that arise from operating a custom DNS solution. Unlike public DNS zone, private DNS zones are not accessible over internet. DNS queries made against a private DNS zones can be resolved only from the virtual networks linked to the zone.

Customer Provided Keys with Azure Storage Service Encryption

Microsoft presents enhancement to storage service encryption to support granular encryption settings on storage account with keys hosted in any key store. Customer provided keys (CPK) enables you to store and manage keys in on-premises or key stores other than Azure Key Vault to meet corporate, contractual, and regulatory compliance requirements for data security.

New Azure Active Directory roles to reduce the number of Global administrators

Microsoft introduces 16 new roles in Azure AD designed to help you reduce the number of Global administrators by delegating administration tasks and assigning lower-privileged roles.

New Azure Resource Graph functionality

An update to Azure Resource Graph API now allows you to see further details about the changes to your Azure resources. For each change record, an overall changeType is returned indicating if the overall change to the resource was a Create, Update, or Delete action. When you set the fetchPropertyChanges flag to true in your request, the response body will contain a new section called propertyChanges that contains the list of property changes made, including the property name, the before value, the after value, and the change type for that property change (Insert, Update, or Remove).

Large file shares (100 TiB) for Azure Files standard tier

Microsoft announces the general availability of larger, more powerful files shares (100TiB) for Azure Files on standard tier. Large file shares on standard shares significantly improves customers’ experience on standard shares by increasing not only the capacity limits to 100 TiB (20x increase), but also the performance limits up to 10,000 IOPS (10x increase) and 300 MiB/s (5x increase). Large file shares for standard tier is now live in 13 Azure regions with support to enable large file shares on existing accounts.

SR-IOV availability schedule on NCv3 Virtual Machines SKU

As part of Azure’s ongoing commitment to providing industry-leading performance, Microsoft is enabling support for all MPI types and versions, and RDMA verbs for InfiniBand-equipped virtual machines, beginning with NCv3 coming in early November 2019.

Azure Monitor updates

  • Azure Monitor for VMs is available in South Central US, West US, Central US, North Central US, East Asia, and Central India. It’s available around the world in eighteen public regions.
  • In April 2019 Microsoft added support for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) in China regions. As part of this support, multi-cluster view is now available in the table of contents so you can monitor multiple clusters at once. Also, AKS-Engine is now supported for China regions. 
  • Azure Monitor for containers has updated the agent to support pod annotation settings. This supports Prometheus metrics scrapping per namespace configurations via config map. Also supports descriptive error outputs to troubleshoot scrape settings.
  • Grafana dashboard template is now available for out-of-the-box metrics collected by Azure Monitor for containers.

How to address the end of lifecycle for Windows Server 2008\2008 R2

The end of Microsoft support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is imminent and planned for 14 January 2020. As of this date, Microsoft will no longer release free security updates for these platforms in an on-premises environment. Unfortunately, there are still many systems in production that adopt these operating system versions. This article discusses the approaches you can take to address this situation, avoiding exposing your infrastructure to security issues caused by the unavailability of the necessary updates.

The end of the extended support for these platforms implies that Microsoft, unless certain actions are taken, will no longer release its security updates. Under these conditions the exposure to security attacks is considerable and would result in the state of non-compliance with respect to specific regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This condition, certainly not very pleasant for those who find themselves to face it now, given the limited time, it can also be seen as an important opportunity for renewal and innovation of the infrastructure.

To continue receiving security updates for Windows Server 20082008 R2 hosted on on-premises environment, the only possibility is to join to the program Extended Security Update (ESU). The fee program is only available for customers in Software Assurance and ensures the provision of Security Update classified as "critical" and "important" for a further three years, from 14 January 2020.

If the ESU program is not appropriate to their needs you can be assessed two totally different upgrade paths.

Upgrade on-premises

This path provides for the transition to a new version of Windows Server environment on-premises. The advice in this case is to approach at least Windows Server 2016 and not to proceed, whenever possible, with upgrade in place of the operating system, but to manage migration in side-by-side. This method usually requires the involvement of the application provider, to ensure software compatibility with the new version of the operating system. Since the software is not recent, often it require the adoption of updated versions of the same, which may comprise architecture adjustment and an in-depth phase of testing for the new release . By adopting this upgrade process, the time and effort are considerable, but the result you get is critical to complying with the technological renewal.

Migrating to Azure

Migrating Windows Server Systems 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 on-premises in Azure environment will continue to receive security updates for another three years, classified as critical and important, without having to join the ESU program. This scenario is not only useful to ensure compliance with its systems, but it opens the way towards hybrid architectures where you can get the cloud advantages. In this regard, Microsoft offers a great solution that can provide a large set of tools needed to best deal with the most common migration scenarios: Azure Migrate,  that structure the migration process in different phase (discovery, assessment, and migration). This approach may be more immediate than upgrading systems and gives you more time to deal with software renewal. In this regard, the cloud allows you to have excellent flexibility and agility in testing applications in parallel environments. Before starting the migration path towards Azure is fundamental to structure the hybrid networking environment in a timely manner and evaluate the iterations with the other infrastructure components, to see whether the application can also work well in the cloud.

Regardless of the upgrade path you decide to take the advice is to make a detailed assessment, so you can categorize workloads by type, criticality, complexity and risk. In this way it is possible to prioritize, and proceed with a structured migration plan.

Conclusions

For all those who, inside their own datacenter have Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 is appropriate to manage the condition that Microsoft will not release more security updates, free of charge, exposing systems to potential security issues. At the same time there are various possibilities offered by Microsoft to address this situation in the best possible ways. The migration path to Azure is definitely a very interesting option to start the journey to expand your datacenter into the Microsoft public cloud.

Azure Networking: the new way to privately access services in Azure

The need to be able to access data and services in Azure in a totally private and secure way, in particular from on-premises environment, it's definitely very much felt and more and more widespread. For this reason, Microsoft has announced the availability of Azure Private Link, this simplifies the network architecture by establishing a private connection to services in Azure, without the need for exposure to Internet. This article describes the characteristics of this type of connectivity and how you can enable it.

Thanks to Azure Private Link you can bring Azure services to a virtual network and map them with a private endpoint. In this way, all traffic is routed through the private endpoint, keeping it on the Microsoft global network. The data does not pass ever on the Internet, this reduces exposure to threats and helps to meet the compliance standards.

Figure 1 - Overview of Azure Private Link

The concept that underlies Azure Private Link is already partly known under the Azure networking and invokes the Virtual Network Service Endpoints. Before the introduction of Azure Private Link the only available way to increase the level of security when accessing Azure services, such as Azure Storage and SQL Azure Database, was given by the VNet Service Endpoints. The difference is substantial, as using VNet Service Endpoints traffic remains in the Microsoft backbone network, allowing access to PaaS resources only from its own VNet, but the PaaS endpoint is still accessed via the public IP of the service. Consequently, the operating principle of the VNet Service Endpoints does not extend to on-premises world even in the presence of connectivity with Azure (VPN or ExpressRoute). In fact,, to provide access from on-premises systems you must continue to use the firewall rules to limit the connectivity only to your public IP.

Thanks to Azure Private Link you can instead access the PaaS resources via a private IP address of your VNet, which it is potentially also accessible from:

  • On-premises systems via Azure ExpressRoute private peering andor Azure VPN gateways.
  • Systems on VNet in peering.

All traffic resides within the Microsoft network and you do not need to configure access through public IPs of the PaaS Service.

Figure 2 – Access from on-premises and peered networks

Azure Private Link greatly simplifies the way you can access Azure services (Azure PaaS, Azure, Microsoft partners and private services) as they support cross configurations for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenants.

Figure 3 – Private Link cross Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenants

Activating Azure Private link it's simple and requires a limited number of Azure networking-side configurations. Connectivity occurs based on a call approval flow and when a PaaS resource is mapped to a private endpoint, route table and Network Security Groups configuration is not required (NSG).

Since Private link center you can create new services and manage the configuration or configure existing services to take advantage of Private link.

Figure 4 - Starting Configuration from Private link center

Figure 5 - Creating an Azure Storage Account to make it privately accessible

Figure 6 - Classical parameters for the creation of an storage account

Figure 7 - Private endpoint configuration

Figure 8 - Private endpoint connection present in the created storage accounts

At this point the storage account will be available in totally private way. To test the connectivity access a virtual machine was created and verified through "Connection troubleshoot":

Figure 9 – Test performed by "Connection troubleshoot" that demonstrates private connectivity

To connect with each other more Azure Virtual Network are typically used VNet peering, that require there are no overlaps in VNets address spaces. If this condition occurs it is possible to adopt the Azure Private Link as an alternative way to privately connect applications that reside in different VNets with an overlapping address space.

Figure 10 – Azure Private Link in the presence of overlapping address space

Azure Private Link features allow you to have specific access only to explicitly mapped resources. In the event of a security incident within your VNet, this mechanism eliminates the threat of extracting data from other resources using the same endpoint.

Figure 11 - Targeted access only to explicitly mapped resources

The Azure Private Link also opens new scenarios for exposure of service in Azure provided by the service provider. In order to allow access to the services provided to its customers, one of these methods was typically carried out in one of these ways.:

  • They made themselves directly accessible via Public IPs.
  • To make them private, VNet peerings were created, but with scalability issues and potential IP conflicts.

Figure 12 - How Azure Private Links changing scenarios "Consumer Service" - "Service Provider".

The new possibilities that are offered in these scenarios, requiring a totally private access to the service provided, is the following:

  • Service Provider: set up an Azure Standard Load Balancer, creates a Azure Private Link and allows access to the Service Consumer coming from a different VNet, subscription, or Azure Active Directory tenant (AD).
  • Service consumer: create a Private Endpoint in the specific VNet and request access to the service.

Figure 13 – Azure Private Link workflow in “Service Consumer”-“Service Provider” scenario

For more details please visit the Microsoft's official documentation.

Conclusions

This new method allows you to privately consume Azure-delivered solutions within your network infrastructure. This is an important change that you should definitely consider when designing network architectures in Azure, particularly for hybrid scenarios. At the moment the service is in preview, therefore not yet usable for production environments and available for a limited set of Azure services. In the coming months, however, Microsoft has announced that it will also make this feature available to other Azure services and partners, allowing you to have a private connectivity experience, key to having more adoption and dissemination of these services.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (October 2019 – Weeks: 39 and 40)

This series of blog posts includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft in the last two weeks.

Azure

Large file shares (100 TiB) Azure FIles standard preview available in new regions

Azure Files standard large file shares (LFS) preview in available in two more regions: North Europe and East Asia. Please see the full region list at this page.

New version of Azure Storage Explorer

This month Microsoft released a new version of Azure Storage Explorer, 1.10.0. This latest version of Storage Explorer introduces several new features and delivers significant updates to existing functionality. These features and changes are all designed to make users more efficient and productive when working with Azure Storage, CosmosDB, ADLS Gen2, and, starting with 1.10.0, managed disks. You can download Storage Explorer 1.10.0 to take advantage of all of these new features.

Increment snapshots of Azure managed disks in preview

The preview of incremental snapshots of Azure managed disks is now available. Incremental snapshots are a cost-effective point-in-time backup of managed disks. Unlike current snapshots, which are billed for the full size, incremental snapshots are billed for the delta changes to disks since the last snapshot. They are always stored on the most cost-effective storage i.e., standard HDD irrespective of the storage type of the parent disks. Additionally, for increased reliability, they are stored on Zone redundant storage (ZRS) by default in regions that support ZRS. They cannot be stored on premium storage. 

Windows Virtual Desktop is generally available

Windows Virtual Desktop is generally available worldwide. It is the only service that delivers simplified management, a multi-session Windows 10 experience, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes. It is available in all geographies, customers will be able to deploy scalable Azure-based virtualization solutions with a number of operating systems, including Windows 10 multi-session, Windows Server, and Windows 7 desktops with free Extended Security Updates for up to three years for customers still completing their move to Windows 10.

Azure Lab Service Updates

Azure Lab Services added this new features:

  • Adjust quota per user, enabling instructors to give additional hours to students as needed.
  • An option to install GPU drivers automatically if a GPU size is picked. 
  • An updated and improved UI experience.

Private Link for Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse is in preview

Private Link enables you to connect to Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse via a private endpoint. Use it to establish cross-premises access to the private endpoint using ExpressRoute, private peering, or VPN tunneling, or you can choose to disable all access via public endpoint.

Preview of direct-upload to Azure managed disks

You can directly upload your VHD do Azure Managed disks without converting them. The direct-upload is in preview.

Azure File Sync agent version 4.x will expire

On November 5, 2019, Azure File Sync agent version 4.x will be expired and stop syncing. If you have servers with agent version 4.x, update to a supported agent version (5.x or later). If you don’t update your servers before November 5, 2019, they will stop syncing. To resume syncing, the agent must be updated to a support version.

Azure management services and System Center: What's New in September 2019

Even in September it was announced by Microsoft news regarding the Azure management services and System Center. Our community publishes this summary monthly to provide an overview of these new features. In this way you can stay up-to-date on these topics and have the necessary references to conduct further investigations.

Azure Site Recovery

New Update Rollup

For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 40 that solves several issues and introduces some improvements. The details and the procedure to follow for the installation can be found in the specific KB.

Azure Backup

Support for disks up to 30 TB

For Azure Backup has been announced the support in public preview for large Managed disks, up to 30TB. For further information you can consultthis article.

System Center

New Update Rollup for System Center 2016

Microsoft has released the Update Rollup 8 (UR8) for System Center 2016. This is the second update rollup of the year and includes updates for the following products, mainly aimed at solving problems:

System Center Configuration Manager

New releases for the Technical Preview Branch

For Configuration Manager was released the update 1909 one of the main innovations is the creation of orchestration groups, to better control the deployment of software updates. The Orchestration Groups are designed to give you more flexibility when upgrading devices, including the ability to run PowerShell scripts before and after the update deployment phase.

To check the details of what's included in these updates, you can see this document.

Please note that the Technical Preview Branch releases help you to evaluate new features of SCCM and it is recommended to apply these updates only in test environments.

Evaluation of Azure and System Center

To test and evaluate free of charge the service offered by Azure you can access this page, while to try out the various components of System Center you must Access to theEvaluation Center and, after registering, you can start the trial period.

Azure Migrate: introduction to the solution

The migration of workloads hosted in on-premises datacenter toward Azure is a challenger process that is more and more frequently required to exploit the benefits of cloud. To best address the migration path and achieve the desired results, it is appropriate to carry out a careful preliminary analysis and use appropriate tools. Azure Migrate is the service in Azure that includes a large portfolio of tools that you can use, through a guided experience, to address effectively the most common migration scenarios. This article describes the main features of Azure Migrate and the changes that have recently affected this solution.

Azure Migrate structure the process of migration in different phase: discovery, assessment, and migration. This approach provides an integrated experience that provides continuity and provides an overall view of the migration process.

The solution is currently able to cover the following scenarios of migrating to Azure:

  • Virtual Machines, in a VMware environment, Hyper-V or other public clouds (AWS, Google) and physical machines.
  • SQL Server Database to Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Database Managed Instance.
  • Web App using .NET or PHP to Azure App Service, its Azure Platform-as-a-Service.
    • In this case, you are directed directly to the page App Service Migration, that providing the public URL it scans and provides a detailed report of the technologies that are used, to determine if they can be hosted by App Service. If so, you can start the migration process by using the Migration Assistant installed locally.
  • Large amounts of data via the offline Data Box service.
    • Directly from the portal you can order a Azure Data Box, monitor the shipping status and its data copy process towards Azure.

By accessing Azure Migrate from Azure portal is immediately directed, according to the migration scenario that you want to perform, the most appropriate tools to use.

Figure 1 – Overview of Azure Migrate

To proceed with the use of the tool you need to create a new project. This project is used to save metadata from discovery activities, assessment and migration in the on-premises environment. Metadata is retained in an Azure datacenter in the selected region. However, you can use a project in any region to perform migrations to any Azure region.

Figure 2 – Creating the migration project

Each of these steps is done through solutions provided directly by Microsoft or through tools provided by third-party vendors. At the moment in Azure Migrate are integrated the following third-party tools: Carbonite, Cloudamize, Corent, Device42, Turbonomic, and UnifyCloud.

Figure 4 - Migration Tools Available

The Microsoft tool that allows the assessment of the servers, called "Azure Migrate: Server Assessment", has been enhanced with the following features:

  • It can discover and assess VMware environments that host up to 35000 virtual machines. The limit in the previous version was 1500 VMs.
  • You have the option to profile Hyper-V environments that host up to 10000 VMs.
  • The inventory data from VMware and Hyper-V environments can flow within the same Azure Migrate project.
  • It provides guidance on sizing systems, performs analysis to identify application dependencies and provide a cost estimate.

All of the discovery process and the assessment with the tool Server Assessment occurs without installing any agent. This is a totally free tool for all Azure customers and will soon be enhanced to cover also the support of physical systems.

Also with regard to the migration process Microsoft provides its own tool called "Azure Migrate: Server Migration", that allows you to migrate virtual systems in VMware environments, Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and physical servers. This tool has recently been enhanced with the following features:

  • Ability to migrate VMs in VMware environment in agentless mode. By adopting this mode of migration without agent, you can use the same appliance for the discovery, the assessment and the migration. This ensures that you have operating system-independent support, that allows you to migrate any OS client or server, if supported on Azure.
  • Ability to migrate without agent virtual machines in Hyper-V environments.
  • Agent-based Migration to VMs and physical servers running on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.
  • A new simplified user experience has been introduced, making the process similar to creating a virtual machine in Azure.
  • Ability to perform the migration test without giving any impact, allowing in this way to better plan the migration. Furthermore, the migration process allows to obtain a loss of data equal to zero when moving applications in Azure .

Also "Azure Migrate: Server Migration" is a tool you can be uses for free for all Azure customers. Obviously the costs are to be considered for computational resources and storage used in Azure subscription after the successful migration. In this regard it is also possible to estimate in advance the possible cost savings that can be achieved by migrating workloads in Azure. The tool Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator allows you to define the characteristics of your workloads that you want to migrate and, after arranging different parameters specific to each reality, you get an estimate of the potential savings over the 5 years.

Figure 5 – Chart of an estimate of savings, migrando in Azure, effettuata tramite TCO Calculator

Conclusions

Azure Migrate, thanks to the new features recently released , is an excellent solution that can provide a broad set of tools needed to better address the most common migration scenarios. Azure Migrate is now a real reference point for moving workloads to Azure through integrated and centralized management and a transversal approach, able to deal with different migration paths.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (September 2019 – Weeks: 37 and 38)

This series of blog posts includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft in the last two weeks.

Azure

New cloud regions in Germany

Microsoft Azure is available from new cloud regions in Germany. Azure is available in new cloud datacenter regions in Germany, Germany West Central (located in Frankfurt) and Germany North (located in Berlin), to provide greater flexibility, the latest intelligent cloud services, full connectivity to the global cloud network, and data residency within Germany. The new regions with German-specific compliance, including Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue (C5) attestation, and will remove barriers so in-country companies can benefit from the latest solutions such as containers, IoT, and AI.

Azure Firewall is ISO compliant

Azure Firewall is Payment Card Industry (PCI), Service Organization Controls (SOC), and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) compliant. It currently supports SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001, 27018, 20000-1, 22301, 9001, 27017. For more information, see the Microsoft Compliance Guide.

New Azure ExpressRoute sites

The following new ExpressRoute meet-me sites are now live:

  • Copenhagen
  • Stockholm
  • Munich

Azure Private Link in preview

Private Link simplifies the network architecture and secures the connection between endpoints in Azure by keeping data on the Azure network, thus eliminating exposure to the internet. Private Link also enables you to create and render your own services on Azure. During public preview, Private Link supports Azure Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and customer-owned services.

Monitor bandwidth for all peered Azure virtual networks with ExpressRoute

Azure network monitoring solutions including Network Performance Monitor and Network Watcher help monitor your networks in the cloud and in hybrid environments. ExpressRoute Monitoring enables you to monitor network performance over ExpressRoute circuits that are configured to use private peering or Microsoft peering.

Azure Monitor for Azure Virtual Machines is available in additional regions

Monitor for Virtual Machines monitors and analyzes the performance and health of your Windows and Linux virtual machines hosted in Azure, on-premises, or with another cloud provider. Azure Monitor for Azure Virtual Machines is now available in Japan East, North Europe, and East US2.

Service Map feature of Azure Monitor is available in additional regions

Service Map automatically discovers application components on Windows and Linux systems and maps communication between services. The feature enables you to view your servers, processes, inbound and outbound connection latency, and ports as interconnected systems. The Service Map feature of Azure Monitor is available in Japan East, North Europe, and East US2.

Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) for Azure Files premium tier

Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) is available for Azure Files premium tier. The ZRS replication provides customers a choice of performant Azure Files services with higher availability. With the release of ZRS support, Azure Files premium tier now offers two durability options:

  • Zone redundant storage (ZRS) for data protection against entire zonal outage.
  • Locally-redundant storage (LRS) for lower cost-effective storage for data protection against hardware failure.

Currently, ZRS option is available in West Europe and we plan to gradually expand the regional coverage.

Azure Lab Services supports new GPU Virtual Machine sizes

Azure Lab Services supports two new 6-core GPU Virtual Machine sizes:

  • Small GPU (Compute): 6 cores, 56 GB RAM, 139 Lab units.
    • Available in US, North Europe, and West Europe regions
    • Best-suited for compute-intensive and network-intensive applications such as Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning
  • Small GPU (Visualization): 6 cores, 56 GB RAM, 160 Lab units.
    • Available in US, North Europe, West Europe, and Australia regions
    • Best-suited for remote visualization, streaming, gaming, and encoding using frameworks such as OpenGL and DirectX.

M-series virtual machines (VMs) are available in new regions

Azure M-series VMs are now available in: Germany West, Germany North, Switzerland West and Switzerland North. M-series VMs offer configurations with memory from 192 GB to 3.8 TiB (4 TB) RAM and are certified for SAP HANA.

Azure Networking: what's new in Azure Firewall

Azure Firewall is the firewall-as-a-service solution exists in the Microsoft public cloud, which allows you to secure the resources present in the Azure Virtual Networks and to govern the related network flows. This service has been officially released from several months and, as is often the case with cloud services, there are rapid evolutions, to improve the service and increase the feature set. This article lists the top news that recently affected Azure Firewall.

Public IP addresses associated with Azure Firewall

While initially, only one public IP address could be associated with Azure Firewall, now you can associate up to 100 public IP addresses. This opens up new configuration and operation scenarios:

  • In DNAT configurations you have the option to use the same port on different public IP addresses.
  • For SNAT outbound connections will be available a larger number of ports, reducing the ability to finish the doors available.

Currently the source Public IP address of Azure Firewall used for the connections is chosen randomly. This should be considered when you need specific permissions for traffic from Azure Firewall. Microsoft still has a roadmap of SNAT configurations by specifying the Public IP address to use. The steps to deploy Azure Firewall with multiple public IP addresses, using PowerShell commands, you can consult in this document.

Figure 1 – Assign multiple public IPs to Azure Firewall from the Azure portal

Availability Zones

In order to increase the availability levels of Azure Firewall, you can, during the creation phase,  plan to use the Availability Zones. Selecting two or more Availability Zones will allow you to get an uptime percentage of the 99.99 %. Full details about Service Level Agreements (SLA) of Azure Firewall are contained in this document. The adoption of this deployment methodology does not involve any additional costs, but you need to contemplate an increase in the costs of inbound and outbound data transfer from Availability Zones, available in this document. Compared to the cost of the Azure Firewall, these do not have a particularly significant impact. I personally think that if you adopt an architecture of the networking where Azure Azure Firewall is the core component for the security of the environment, it becomes very useful to use the Availability Zones to ensure a high level of availability of mission-critical applications protected by this service.

Figure 2 - Configuration of Availability Zones in the process of creating Azure Firewall

In the presence of Azure Firewall created without the use of Availability Zones, you do not have the possibility of carrying out a conversion to the use of the same. The only currently available method involves the creation of a new Azure Firewall migrating existing configurations. Backups in JSON format of the Azure Firewall configuration can be made using the following PowerShell commands:

[cc lang=”powershell”]

$AzureFirewallId = (Get-AzFirewall -Name “AzureFirewallName” -ResourceGroupName “Network-RG”).id

$BackupFileName = “.AzureFirewallBackup.json”

Export-AzResourceGroup -ResourceGroupName “Network-RG” -Resource $AzureFirewallId -SkipAllParameterization -Path $BackupFileName

[/cc]

With the availability of the JSON file you need to edit it to contemplate the Availability Zones:

[cc lang=”powershell”]

{

“apiVersion”: “2019-04-01”,

“type”: “Microsoft.Network/azureFirewalls”,

“name”: “[variables(‘FirewallName’)]”,

“location”: “[variables(‘RegionName’)]”,

“zones”: [

“1”,

“2”,

“3”

],

“properties”: {

“ipConfigurations”: [

{

[/cc]

After the change is complete, you can deploy the new Azure Firewall, using suitably modified JSON file, using the following command:

[cc lang=”powershell”]

New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -name “RestoreFirewallAvZones” -ResourceGroupName “Network-RG” -TemplateFile “.AzureFirewallBackup.json”

[/cc]

Centralized management with third party solutions

Azure Firewall exposes publicly REST APIs that can be used by third-party vendors to provide solutions that allow a centralized management of Azure Firewall, Network Security Groups (NSGs), and network virtual appliances (NVA's). At the moment these are the vendors that offer such solutions: Barracuda with Cloud Security Guardian, AlgoSec with CloudFlow and Tufin with Orca.

Just-in-time (JIT) VM access for Azure Firewall

When a user requests access to a VM with a Just-in-time policy (JIT), the Security Center first checks whether the user actually has Role-Based Access Control permissions (RBAC) required to make the request for access. If so the request is approved, and the Security Center is able to automatically configure not only the NSG, but also the necessary rules in Azure Firewall side to allow incoming traffic.

Application rules with SQL FQDN

In application rule of Azure Firewall the ability to specify the SQL FQDN was introduced. This makes it possible to control access from the virtual network to specific instances of SQL Server. Through SQL FQDN you can filter traffic:

  • From Virtual Network to a Azure SQL database or a SQL Azure Data Warehouse.
  • From the on-premises environment to a SQL Azure Managed Instances or SQL IaaS running on Virtual Network.
  • From spoke-to-spoke to Azure SQL Managed Instances or SQL IaaS running on Virtual Network.

Figure 3 - Creating Application Rule with SQL FQDN

FQDN Tag for Azure HDInsight (HDI)

Azure HDInsight clusters present on its Virtual Network have different dependencies on other Azure services (for example Azure Storage), with which an outgoing network traffic is necessary to operate in the correct way. With the introduction of the FQDN tags for HDInsight you can configure Azure Firewall to restrict outbound access for HDI clusters. For more details please visit the Microsoft's official documentation.

Automation to handle the backup

Having a strategy to restore the configuration of the service in a short time is critical because this service is the government center of your Azure networking environment and contains several rules to comprehensively manage the network traffic. The service currently does not have an integrated feature to make full backup periodically. In this article you can find a mechanism designed to make the scheduled backup of the configuration of this component using the Azure Automation service.

Conclusions

Azure Firewall is a solution that is increasingly being used in network architectures of Azure, for the advantages over firewall solutions by third party vendors and thanks to a constant enrichment of features offered. All these new features make Azure Firewall a more comprehensive solution, totally integrated in the platform, that allows you to secure the resources on Azure Virtual Networks with high flexibility.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (September 2019 – Weeks: 35 and 36)

This series of blog posts includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft in the last two weeks.

Azure

Microsoft Azure available from new cloud regions in Switzerland

Microsoft announced the availability of new Azure Regions in Switzerland. With the Azure Region Switzerland West and Switzerland North, Microsoft addresses the need of customers to have cloud regions and datacenters available in Switzerland. Remember that not all services are available in all Azure regions. You can find more information about the products and services available in the Swiss Azure regions on the Azure website.

31 new Azure edge sites

Microsoft announced the addition of 31 new edge sites, bringing the total to over 150 across more than 50 countries. Microsoft is also adding 14 new meet-me sites to Azure ExpressRoute to further enable and expand access to dedicated private connections between customers’ on-premises environments and Azure.

Azure Firewall in China

Azure Firewall is also available in China.

Azure DevTest Labs now integrates with Azure Bastion

Azure DevTest Labs now integrates with Azure Bastion, enabling you to connect to your virtual machines through a web browser. Azure Bastion provides secure and seamless RDP/SSH connectivity to your virtual machines directly in the Azure portal over SSL. As a lab owner, it’s possible to enable your lab virtual machines to have browser-based access provided they’re created in a virtual network that has Azure Bastion configured on it.

Azure Stack

Azure App Service on Azure Stack Update 7 (1.7)

This release updates the resource provider and brings the following key capabilities and fixes:

  • Updates to **App Service Tenant, Admin, Functions portals and Kudu tools**. Consistent with Azure Stack Portal SDK version.
  • Updates to core service to improve reliability and error messaging enabling easier diagnosis of common issues.
  • Access Restrictions now enabled in User Portal

All other fixes and updates are detailed in the App Service on Azure Stack Update Seven Release Notes.

Diagnostic log collection is generally available for Azure Stack

The Azure Stack diagnostic log collection service provides a simplified way for Azure Stack operators to collect and share diagnostic logs with Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS). A new user experience in the Azure Stack administrator portal is available for operators to set up the automatic upload of diagnostic logs to a storage blob when certain critical alerts are raised, or to perform the same operation on demand.