Mike: Welcome, folks.
Let's dive into securing application network traffic.
Protecting your applications from various network threats
is important to maintain the integrity, availability,
and confidentiality of your data and services.
Application network traffic is often targeted
by malicious actors
exploiting web application vulnerabilities
or launching Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks,
and these threats can lead to data breaches,
service disruptions, and reputational damage.
In this lesson, we will explore two key Azure services
that help secure your Azure network traffic,
Azure Web Application Firewall and Azure DDoS Protection.
We'll discuss when to use each service
and how they can be integrated
into your overall application security strategy.
Azure Web Application Firewall is a critical component
for securing your application network traffic.
It provides a firewall that protects your web applications
from common exploits and vulnerabilities.
Two of the most common being SQL injection,
or SQL injection, and cross-site scripting,
also abbreviated XSS.
It also provides centralized protection
for multiple web applications.
One of the key features of Azure WAF is its protection
against the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities.
OWASP, or Open Web Application Security Project,
identifies the most critical security risks for applications
and Azure WAF offers built-in rules to mitigate these risks.
It also allows you to define custom rules and rule groups
based on your specific application needs.
This flexibility enables you
to tailor the firewall protection
to your unique security requirements.
Integration with Azure services
is another significant advantage.
It can easily integrate with Azure Application Gateway,
Azure Front Door, and Azure CDN to give you a comprehensive
security solution for all of your application traffic.
It also has centralized monitoring
and reporting capabilities
so that you can track security events and trends.
Logging and analytics provide valuable insights
into potential threats and help you make informed decisions
about your application security posture.
You should consider using Azure Web Application Firewall
when you need to protect your web applications
from common vulnerabilities because, again,
it has those built right in when you need to meet
compliance requirements such as PCI DSS
or you want to centralize security management
for multiple web applications.
Azure DDoS Protection is a service that helps safeguard
your applications and resources from DDoS attacks.
DDoS attacks can overwhelm your network
and application resources,
making them unavailable to legitimate users.
This is one of the most common and widespread attacks
that is done with web applications on the internet.
Some key features of Azure DDoS Protection
is that it has always-on traffic monitoring,
where it continuously monitors
and gives real-time detection of DDoS attacks.
It has adaptive tuning, so you have automatic learning
of application traffic patterns and behaviors
so it can spot those out-of-band or unusual behaviors,
hopefully helping you to mitigate the attack
as it's happening early or even before.
Scalable mitigation, so it automatically scales
to absorb and mitigate large-scale DDoS attacks.
It has attack analytics and insights,
which is done by giving you detailed telemetry,
and attack insights for post-attack analysis,
helping you to then make adjustments
and hopefully better mitigate the next attack.
You should consider using Azure DDoS Protection
when you have mission-critical applications and resources
that require high availability and business continuity.
And it is particularly important for organizations
that have compliance requirements for DDoS protection
or are at risk of volumetric and protocol attacks.
Best practices for securing
your application network traffic.
Implement a layered security approach.
Combine Azure WAF and DDoS Protection
with other security measures
such as network security groups,
access controls, and encryption.
By doing a multi-layered defense,
you help to mitigate risks at different levels
of your application stack.
Regular vulnerability assessments
and penetration testing are crucial to identifying
and addressing potential security vulnerabilities
in your applications.
Conduct these assessments periodically
to proactively discover
and remediate any security weaknesses.
Keep your WAF rules and signatures up to date.
As new threats emerge,
it's important to regularly update your WAF rules
to ensure protection against the latest
vulnerabilities and attack vectors.
Monitoring and analyzing security logs and metrics
is essential for detecting and responding
to security incidents.
You can utilize Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center
for centralized monitoring to gain these types of insights
into your application security posture.
Both Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center
have a free level of investigative capabilities
and monitoring capabilities.
And then for additional fees,
you can get even more insight
into your application security posture.
Implement security best practices
throughout your application development lifecycle.
When designing a solution, take the time as an architect
to follow up on whether there are secure coding practices
being done, what kind of code reviews are being done,
what kind of security testing is being done
at the development level.
Finally, educate and train your employees
on application security.
Promote a culture of security awareness
within your organization
and ensure that everyone understands their role
in protecting your applications and data.
FairBank is a global financial institution
that offers online banking services to its customers.
They want to ensure the security of their web applications
and protect against potential threats.
Take a moment to read this over.
Pause the video, and when you finish reading,
you can go ahead and resume the video
and we'll look at the solution.
First, they can employ Azure WAF
as part of Azure Application Gateway
or Azure Front Door,
depending on their application architecture.
By configuring WAF rules
to protect against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities,
FairBank can safeguard their web applications
from common exploits.
Customizing the WAF rules
based on FairBank's specific application requirements
ensures targeted protection,
and they can also enable
centralized logging and monitoring.
To defend against DDoS attacks,
FairBank can enable Azure DDoS Protection Standard
for their virtual (indistinct) networks
by configuring DDoS protection policies to define thresholds
and actions that can automatically detect
and mitigate potential DDoS attacks.
Monitoring DDoS attack analytics and insights
allows FairBank to gain valuable information
about the nature and scale of the attacks,
which will help being proactive with new defense measures.
Integrating Azure WAF and DDoS Protection
with FairBank's existing security solutions,
such as their Security Information and Event Management
or SIEM system provides a unified view of security events
and enables coordinated incident response.
Leveraging Azure Security Center
for unified security management and threat protection
further enhances FairBank's overall security posture.
This is just another example of how you can take
Azure technologies like we've covered here in this video
and apply them to a real-world scenario
that many businesses in the real world actively encounter.
I hope this video has been helpful for you,
and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.