Additionally, to help you keep track of dedicated administrative accounts, you may use recommendations from Azure Security Center or built-in Azure Policies, such as: How to use Azure Security Center to monitor identity and access (Preview). Application Gateway WAF provides protection from common security exploits and vulnerabilities and can run in the following two modes: Azure Security Center monitoring: Not applicable. Additionally, clearly mark subscriptions (for ex. Configure your Azure API Management instance to protect your APIs by using the OAuth 2.0 protocol with Azure Active Directory (AD). The gateway can access resources within the virtual network. However, that should not deter businesses from optimizing everyday operations, especially in regard to their cloud workloads. APIs handle an immense amount of data, which is why it’s imperative to invest in API security. Guidance: Management plane calls are made through Azure Resource Manager over TLS. Use Azure Policy aliases in the "Microsoft.ApiManagement" namespace to create custom policies to audit or enforce the configuration of Azure API Management instances. Azure AD protects data by using strong encryption for data at rest and in transit. It is a best practice to use either service tags or application security groups to simplify management. Customers can maintain inventory of API Management user accounts and reconcile access as needed. Some advantages of Traffic Analytics are the ability to visualize network activity and identify hot spots, identify security threats, understand traffic flow patterns, and pinpoint network misconfigurations. Azure API Management subscriptions, which are one means of securing access to APIs, do however come with a pair of generated subscription keys. Verbosity of the logging can be configured on a service-wide and per-API basis. For more information, see Security control: Secure configuration. Guidance: By publishing and managing your APIs via Azure API Management, you're taking advantage of fault tolerance and infrastructure capabilities that you'd otherwise design, implement, and manage manually. If any of these ports are unavailable, API Management may not operate properly and may become inaccessible. In all tiers of API Management with the exception of Consumption tier, the IP address of the gateway remains constant, with a few caveats described in the IP documentation article. Guidance: Whenever possible, use Azure AD as the central authentication and authorization system. For more information, see Security control: Vulnerability management. Ensure that all Azure resources present in the environment are approved. Managed identities can be used to obtain certificates from Azure Key Vault for API Management custom domain names. If your organization is not using database-level encryption, you may be more susceptible to attacks. Credential Scanner will also encourage moving discovered credentials to more secure locations such as Azure Key Vault. Azure security services. Sign up for our free 14 day hosted trial to learn how! Enable Azure DDoS Protection Standard on the Vnet associated with your API Management deployment to protect from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. How to create an NSG with a Security Config. This walkthrough examines the steps to create an API in Azure through the Azure Portal, as well as through Visual Studio Code. Azure security best practices Viktorija Almazova, IT Security Architect. Analyze and monitor logs for anomalous behaviors and regularly review results. Guidance: * Please follow the Microsoft Rules of Engagement to ensure your Penetration Tests are not in violation of Microsoft policies, Security control: Identity and access control, Understanding Azure API Management Subscriptions, Authorize developer accounts by using Azure Active Directory in Azure API Management, How to delegate user registration and product subscription, How to configure Named Locations in Azure, List of Customer Lockbox-supported services, Understand customer data protection in Azure, Understand data protection/encryption at rest with Azure API Management, Security control: Vulnerability management, Understanding security controls available to Azure API Management, Security control: Inventory and asset management, How to set custom domain names with guidance for Key Vault key rotation, NIST's publication - Guide to Test, Training, and Exercise Programs for IT Plans and Capabilities, How to set the Azure Security Center Security Contact, How to configure Workflow Automation and Logic Apps, Security control: Penetration tests and red team exercises, Please follow the Microsoft Rules of Engagement to ensure your Penetration Tests are not in violation of Microsoft policies, You can find more information on Microsoft’s strategy and execution of Red Teaming and live site penetration testing against Microsoft managed cloud infrastructure, services and applications, here. Azure API Management outputs logs and metrics to Azure Monitor by default. Developer accounts that are in an active state can be used to access all of the APIs for which they have subscriptions. Guidance: Not currently available; vulnerability assessment in Azure Security Center is not currently available for Azure API Management. With that being said, extra precautions and Azure security best practices need to be considered in order to maximize security efforts. A good practice is to enforce an arrest in spike traffic or a per-app usage quota, so that the backend won’t be impacted. The gateway can access resources within the virtual network. Combining API Management provisioned in an internal Vnet with the Application Gateway frontend enables the following scenarios: Note: This feature is available in the Premium and Developer tiers of API Management. The baseline for this service is drawn from the Azure Security Benchmark version 1.0 , which provides recommendations on how you can secure your cloud solutions on Azure with our best practices guidance. DreamFactory makes it easy with User Management, SSO Authentication, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), CORS, Role-Based Access Control on API endpoints, record-level permissions on data, OAuth, LDAP, Active Directory, SAML integration, and more. Microsoft Azure SQL Database utilizes these rules to limit connectivity by IP address, in addition to enforcing authentication and authorization measures. creation, publication, security, monitoring, and analytics. Guidance: Configure your Azure API Management instance to authenticate developer accounts by using Azure Active Directory as an identity provider in Azure API Management. Although Azure Database provides a range of security features, end users are required to practice additional security measures. Take steps to automatically generate, publish, and manage REST APIs. How to create queries with Azure Resource Graph. Microsoft manages the address prefixes encompassed by the service tag and automatically updates the service tag as addresses change. Because these best practices might not be appropriate or sufficient for your environment, treat them as helpful considerations rather than prescriptions. Application Gateway is a PaaS service. Guidance: Configure Azure Conditional Access to limit users' ability to interact with Azure Resource Manager by configuring "Block access" for the "Microsoft Azure Management" App. API management enables enterprises or developers that publish or consume an API to monitor the interface's lifecycle and ensure that the API is performing as it was designed. DreamFactory can be deployed on premise behind the firewall, in a DreamFactory-hosted environment or on a self-hosted cloud. The number of companies that consider themselves a platform provider is increasing, and so is the number of companies building APIs and applications. Update: Downloadable/printable copies of the Microsoft 365 Best practices checklists and guides are now available for purchase at GumRoad.Thanks for your support! Our guided tour will show you how to create an API using an example MySQL database provided to you as part of the trial! It acts as a reverse-proxy and provides L7 load balancing, routing, web application firewall (WAF), and other services. Azure identity management and access control security best practices discussed in this article include: Treat identity as the primary security perimeter; Centralize identity management; Manage connected tenants; Enable single sign-on; Turn on Conditional Access; Plan for routine security improvements; Enable password management You can create alerts based on your Log Analytics workspace queries. Guidance: For control plane audit logging, enable Azure Activity Log diagnostic settings and send activity logs to a Log Analytics workspace for reporting and analysis, to Azure Storage for long-term safekeeping, to Azure Event Hubs for export in other analytics solutions on Azure and elsewhere. You can turn on logging diagnostics for Application Gateway in the Diagnostics section. How to expose private APIs to external consumers, Azure Web Application Firewall on Azure Application Gateway. Configure desired alerts within Log Analytics. How to integrate API Management in an internal VNET with Application Gateway. It acts as a reverse-proxy and provides L7 load balancing, routing, web application firewall (WAF), and other services. All encryption keys are per service instance and are service managed. Diagnostics logs provide insight into operations that your resource performed. Learn about Privileged Access Workstations. Guidance: Not currently available; data identification, classification, and loss prevention features are not currently available for Azure API Management. Review incidents after the fact to ensure that issues are resolved. Guidance: Implement Credential Scanner to identify credentials within code. Configure your Azure API Management Developer Portal to authenticate developer accounts by using Azure Active Directory. This means that an Azure application may be used in a rule as a source or destination. For more information, see Security control: Logging and monitoring. Use Azure policy [deny] and [deploy if not exist] to enforce secure settings across your Azure resources. Guidance: Azure Active Directory provides logs to help discover stale accounts. How to set log retention parameters for Log Analytics Workspaces, How to archive logs to an Azure Storage account. In terms of auditing, you’ll want to track and log events. Use Azure Security Center Identity and Access Management to monitor the number of administrative accounts. Although the database will be encrypted, it is recommended that you follow these recommendations: In terms of threat detection, it’s up to you to discover and classify the most sensitive, critical data in your databases. How to create a managed identity for an API Management instance, Policy to authenticate with managed identity. You may also send NSG flow logs to a Log Analytics workspace and use Traffic Analytics to provide insights into traffic flow in your Azure cloud. For more information, see Security control: Incident response. How to backup Azure Key Vault certificates. Guidance: Use Azure Resource Graph to query/discover all resources (such as compute, storage, network, ports, and protocols etc.) Guidance: Use privileged access workstations (PAW) with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) configured to log into and configure Azure resources. APIs handle an immense amount of data, which is why it’s imperative to invest in API security. For example, you must manage strong credentials yourself. Guidance: Configure API Management within a Virtual Network (Vnet) in internal mode and configure an Azure Application Gateway. Guidance: Configure API Management within a Virtual Network (Vnet) in internal mode and configure an Azure Application Gateway. Use a single API Management resource for exposing all APIs to both internal consumers and external consumers. • April 30, 2020. To ensure customer data within Azure remains secure, Microsoft has implemented and maintains a suite of robust data protection controls and capabilities. How to monitor and review logs for Azure API Management, How to perform custom queries in Azure Monitor. Reconcile inventory on a regular basis and ensure unauthorized resources are deleted from the subscription in a timely manner. How to enable diagnostic settings for Azure Activity Log, How to enable diagnostic settings for Azure API Management, How to configure an alert rule for Azure API Management, How to view capacity metrics of an Azure API management instance. For more information, see Security control: Data recovery. A secure API management platform is essential to providing the necessary data security for a company’s APIs. Use Azure Policy aliases in the "Microsoft.ApiManagement" namespace to create custom policies to audit or enforce the configuration of Azure API Management instances. You may also send NSG flow logs to a Log Analytics workspace and use Traffic Analytics to provide insights into traffic flow in your Azure cloud. In addition, you may onboard the Log Analytics workspace to Azure Sentinel or a third-party SIEM. API Management supports multi-region deployment which makes the data plane impervious to regional failures without adding any operational overhead. Azure is a prime example of a beneficial cloud computing service, particularly in terms of unified API management, storage, and disaster recovery. The severity is based on how confident Security Center is in the finding or the analytic used to issue the alert as well as the confidence level that there was malicious intent behind the activity that led to the alert. For data plane audit logging, diagnostic logs provide rich information about operations and errors that are important for auditing as well as troubleshooting purposes. Guidance: Sensitive data such as certificates, keys, and secret named values are encrypted with service-managed, per service instance keys. However, one of the most common questions from our customers is: "What is the best way to implement an effective CI/CD pipeline with Azure API Management?" By default, newly created developer accounts are Active, and associated with the Developers group. Guidance: Azure API Management can be configured to leverage Azure Active Directory as an identity provider for authenticating users on the Developer Portal in order to benefit from the SSO capabilities offered by Azure AD. How to configure Azure DDoS Protection Standard, Understand Azure Security Center Integrated Threat Intelligence. Underlying platform scanned and patched by Microsoft. Guidance: To protect critical Web/HTTP APIs configure API Management within a Virtual Network (Vnet) in internal mode and configure an Azure Application Gateway. Guidance: Define and implement standard security configurations for your Azure API Management services with Azure Policy. Kibana provides flexible reporting on all API calls with pre-configured dashboards segmented by instance, application, role, user, API endpoint, and more. These best practices come from our experience with Azure security and the experiences of customers like you. 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