Azure Security Tools and How to Use Them 

Cyber attacks on UK businesses aren’t slowing down. According to the government’s  Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025, just over four in ten businesses (43%) reported experiencing a cyber security breach or attack in the last 12 months. That’s around 612,000 UK businesses affected in a single year.  

The UK Cyber Assessment Framework makes clear that effective security needs you to know your risks and continuously improve your defences. For organisations running workloads in Azure, Microsoft gives you a really strong set of native security tools to help you do exactly that.  

But Azure security isn’t a toolbox where you pick one tool for each job. It’s more like a mesh, where tools overlap, integrate, and reinforce each other. Getting to grips with how these tools work together matters more than memorising what each one does on its own.  

This guide covers the major Azure security tools and features, organised by what they actually help you achieve.  

Migrating to Azure? Or looking to strengthen your existing environment? Read on for a clear picture of what’s available and where to focus your efforts.  

The Microsoft shared responsibility model  

Before diving into specific tools, it’s worth understanding Microsoft’s shared responsibility model. In short: Microsoft secures the cloud infrastructure, but you’re responsible for securing what you put in it.  

This means Microsoft handles physical security, network infrastructure, and the hypervisor layer. You handle identity management, data classification, access controls, and application security. Some responsibilities shift depending on whether you’re using IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, but the principle remains: cloud security is a partnership, not a service you simply buy.  

With that foundation in place, let’s look at how Azure’s native tools help you hold up your end of the bargain.  

The first line of defence is controlling who and what can access your Azure resources. This breaks down into two areas: identity (proving who someone is) and network security (controlling how traffic flows).  

Entra ID  

Entra ID  (formerly Azure Active Directory) is the foundation of identity in Azure. It handles authentication, single sign-on, and conditional access policies. These determine who can access what, from where, and under what conditions. If you’re coming from an on-premises Active Directory environment, Entra ID can synchronise with your existing directory or replace it entirely for cloud-first organisations.  

Multi-factor authentication is built into Entra ID. It should be a must-have for any Azure environment. The stats show that accounts with MFA are much safer. They’re much less likely to be hacked, even if passwords are stolen by phishing or credential stuffing. Microsoft’s security defaults make it easy to set up MFA for your organisation—very little configuration needed.  

Conditional access policies help you create rules. These rules check various signals before allowing access. For example in addition to enforcing MFA when users sign in, you may want to set up specific authentication methods when users log in from outside the office. You can also block access completely from countries where you have no operations. Additionally, you might require compliant devices to access sensitive applications. These policies let you control details without making security a hassle for users in low-risk situations.  

Entra ID’s Privileged Identity Management (PIM) offers just-in-time access to admin roles for privileged access. Users request access as needed instead of having permanent administrators with constant elevated permissions. Approvals, time limits, and audit trails make sure that privileged access is given only when needed and properly documented. This shortens the time attackers have if credentials are compromised. It also shows you who used admin access and when.  

Azure Bastion  

Azure Bastion solves a specific but important problem: secure administrative access to virtual machines. Instead of exposing RDP or SSH ports to the internet (a common attack vector), Bastion gives you browser-based access through the Azure portal. Your VMs stay off the public internet while remaining fully manageable.  

Azure Firewall  

Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-native firewall that filters traffic at the network level. It supports:  

• Application rules (controlling outbound HTTP/HTTPS traffic by FQDN)  

• Network rules (for non-HTTP protocols)  

• Threat intelligence-based filtering that can automatically block traffic from known malicious IP addresses  

Unlike managing your own firewall appliances, Azure Firewall scales automatically with your traffic and integrates natively with Azure Monitor for logging and alerting.  

Network security groups (NSGs) provide more granular filtering at the subnet or network interface level. While Azure Firewall handles centralised traffic filtering, NSGs let you define rules that travel with individual resources. Most environments use both: Azure Firewall for perimeter security and east-west traffic inspection, with NSGs for micro segmentation within virtual networks.  

Azure DDoS Protection  

For firms dealing with volumetric attacks, Azure DDoS Protection provides automatic mitigation of distributed denial-of-service attacks.  

The Basic tier comes with all Azure services for free. It protects you from common network-layer attacks. The Standard tier offers always-on monitoring, adaptive tuning for your traffic patterns, real-time attack metrics, and post-attack analytics. These features help you understand what happened. For public-facing applications, the additional visibility and protection is often worth the investment.  

Azure Private Link  

Azure Private Link takes a different approach to network security: rather than filtering traffic, it eliminates public exposure entirely. Private Link lets you access Azure PaaS services (like Storage, SQL Database, or Key Vault) over a private endpoint in your virtual network. Traffic moves across the Microsoft backbone network and never hits the public internet. This greatly reduces your attack surface. It’s particularly useful for sensitive workloads or companies with strict regulatory requirements around data transit.  

Once you’ve controlled access, the next priority is protecting the data itself, both at rest and in transit.  

Azure Key Vault  

Azure Key Vault is the central service for managing secrets, encryption keys, and certificates. Rather than hardcoding connection strings in your applications or storing passwords in config files, you store them in Key Vault and grant your applications permission to retrieve them. Key Vault also handles key rotation and provides hardware security module (HSM) backing for your most sensitive keys.  

SQL Always Encrypted  

For database workloads in Azure SQL, SQL Always Encrypted gives you client-side encryption that keeps data encrypted even from database administrators. The encryption keys never leave the client application, meaning even someone with full database access can’t read the protected columns. This is really useful for sensitive data like payment card numbers or national insurance numbers.  

Microsoft Purview  

Microsoft Purview brings data governance and protection together. It helps you discover and classify sensitive data across your Azure environment (and beyond), apply sensitivity labels, and enforce data loss prevention policies.  

It’s great for dealing with Shadow IT (employees using systems or devices without the approval of the IT department)—especially through integration with Defender for Cloud apps, which we mention below. It’s especially relevant today when workers can potentially process a lot of sensitive data through cloud AI systems without company permission.  

Purview Information Protection extends these capabilities to documents and emails, making sure that sensitive information stays protected wherever it travels.  

Azure Resource Locks  

Azure Resource Locks give you a simple but effective safeguard against accidental deletion or modification. A delete lock prevents anyone from deleting a resource; a read-only lock prevents any changes at all. For critical infrastructure like production databases or recovery vaults, resource locks give you a really valuable safety net.  

Prevention is obviously essential, but you also need visibility into what’s happening across your environment. Azure’s detection and monitoring tools help you spot threats, investigate incidents, and know everything necessary about your security posture.  

Azure Monitor  

Azure Monitor is the foundation. It collects logs and metrics from across your Azure resources, providing the raw data that other security tools build upon. Monitor handles log aggregation, alerting, and visualisation through workbooks and dashboards. While it’s not purely a security tool, effective security monitoring depends on having Monitor properly configured.  

Microsoft Defender for Cloud  

Microsoft Defender for Cloud serves two purposes: security posture management and threat protection.  

On the posture side, it continuously assesses your environment against security benchmarks (including the Azure Security Benchmark, CIS controls, and regulatory frameworks). It identifies misconfigurations and gives recommendations with clear remediation steps. Many recommendations include a “Fix” button that applies the change directly, making it simple to address issues as you find them.  

On the threat protection side, Defender for Cloud monitors workloads across compute, storage, databases, containers, and more, generating security alerts when it detects suspicious activity.  

Different Defender plans protect different resource types: Defender for Servers adds vulnerability scanning and endpoint detection, Defender for Storage monitors for unusual access patterns, and Defender for SQL protects database workloads. You enable the plans you need based on your environment.  

The secure score in Defender for Cloud gives you a single number representing your overall security posture. It’s calculated based on how many of the recommendations you’ve addressed, weighted by how severe they are. While no single metric tells the whole story, the secure score is useful for tracking improvement over time. It’s certainly useful for demonstrating progress to leadership or auditors, too.  

Microsoft Sentinel  

Microsoft Sentinel takes things further with cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) capabilities.  

Sentinel hoovers up data from across your environment, including Azure, Microsoft 365, on-premises systems, and third-party sources, then uses analytics rules and machine learning to detect threats that might span multiple systems.  

Sentinel’s superpower is how it can spot correlations. An individual failed login might not be noteworthy, but a failed login followed by a successful login from a different location, followed by access to sensitive files, tells a story. Sentinel’s detection rules and machine learning models look for these patterns across your entire data set, surfacing threats that’d be invisible when looking at any single system in isolation.  

Sentinel also provides automation through playbooks built on Azure Logic Apps. When an alert fires, a playbook can:  

• Automatically gather additional context  

• Create a ticket in your service management system  

• Notify the relevant team  

• Take remediation actions like disabling a compromised account.  

This automation is definitely a plus point for smaller security teams that can’t manually triage every alert.  

The main difference between Defender for Cloud and Sentinel is their scope and depth.  

Defender for Cloud focuses on Azure and connected workloads with built-in protection. Sentinel provides broader correlation across your entire estate and more sophisticated investigation and response capabilities.  

Many firms use both: Defender for Cloud as the first line of detection, with alerts forwarded to Sentinel for correlation and response.  

Security tools are only effective if you apply them consistently. Azure’s governance tools help you enforce standards across your environment and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements.  

Azure Policy  

Azure Policy lets you define rules that your Azure resources must follow.  

Policies in Azure can:  

• Audit existing resources  

• Prevent non-compliant resources from being created  

• Automatically remediate drift (the gradual deviation of processes from their approved standards)  

For example, you might enforce that all storage accounts use encryption or that VMs can only be deployed in approved regions. Or you could say that all resources must have specific tags for cost tracking and ownership.  

Policy initiatives group related policies. Microsoft offers built-in initiatives linked to common compliance frameworks, such as ISO 27001, CIS benchmarks, and the UK’s Cyber Essentials. (For a deeper look at meeting regulatory requirements, our guide to compliance in Azure covers the practical steps involved.)  

Security increasingly needs to shift left into the development process itself.  

Microsoft Defender for DevOps  

Microsoft Defender for DevOps integrates with GitHub and Azure DevOps to provide code scanning, secret detection, and dependency vulnerability alerts directly in your development workflow.  

Rather than discovering security issues after deployment, teams catch them during pull requests when they’re cheaper and easier to fix.  

Defender for DevOps scans for common vulnerabilities in your code and its dependencies. It flags secrets that have been accidentally committed (like API keys or connection strings). And it identifies infrastructure-as-code misconfigurations in Terraform, ARM templates, or Bicep files. Results appear in Defender for Cloud alongside your runtime security findings, giving you visibility across both development and production environments.  

Azure Policy and Defender for Cloud also scan container images and Kubernetes configurations, catching issues like containers running as root or images with known vulnerabilities before they reach your clusters. This matters because misconfigurations introduced during deployment are one of the most common causes of cloud security incidents. Fixing them in production is always harder than preventing them in the first place.  

Security and resilience are two sides of the same coin. Even with strong preventive controls, you need to plan for the possibility that something goes wrong. That could be a successful cyber attack, a regional outage… or someone pressing the delete button on a really important file.  

Azure Site Recovery  

Azure Site Recovery gives you disaster recovery as a service, replicating your VMs to a secondary region and enabling failover when it’s needed.  

If ransomware encrypts your production environment or a regional outage takes down your primary datacentre, you can fail over to your replicated environment and keep the business running.  

Building a resilient Azure environment means thinking beyond individual tools to consider how your architecture handles failure. Availability zones distribute resources across physically separate datacentres within a region. Geo-redundant storage replicates data to a secondary region. Multi-region deployments keep your application available even during regional outages. These architectural decisions complement your security tools by making sure that even when defences are breached, the business can recover.  

(You can learn more in our articles on deploying Azure Site Recovery, testing failover procedures, and protecting your DR platform against cyber attacks.)  

If you’re new to Azure or in the middle of a migration, the sheer number of security tools can feel overwhelming. Here’s a practical prioritisation for getting your foundations right.  

Start here – the essentials:  

• Enable MFA for all users through Entra ID, with conditional access policies for sensitive resources  

• Configure Azure Policy to enforce your baseline security requirements  

• Enable Defender for Cloud and work through the high-priority recommendations  

• Set up Azure Monitor to collect logs and create alerts for critical events  

• Apply resource locks to production resources you can’t afford to lose  

⠀Build on the foundations:  

• Implement Azure Firewall or network security groups for traffic filtering  

• Move secrets and keys into Azure Key Vault  

• Deploy Azure Bastion for secure VM administration  

• Enable Microsoft Purview for data discovery and classification  

⠀Strengthen your security posture:  

• Consider Microsoft Sentinel for advanced threat detection and response  

• Implement Defender for DevOps in your CI/CD pipelines  

• Review and refine your policies based on Defender for Cloud recommendations  

This isn’t a one-time exercise. Having a strong security posture means giving it continuous attention. Azure’s tools are designed to support ongoing improvement rather than a single implementation project.  

A final point worth emphasising: security tools are only part of the picture. Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework goes further and gives you guidance on security teams, roles, and functions. Knowing who’s responsible for what matters as much as having the right tools in place.  

Having a clear security strategy also helps. Whether you adopt Zero Trust principles or another framework, the key is consistency: applying the same vigilance across identity, network, data, and applications rather than treating each as a separate problem.  

And remember the shared responsibility model we mentioned at the start. Microsoft provides the tools, but using them effectively is down to you. For a broader view of securing your Azure environment, our Azure security best practices guide covers the fundamentals that apply regardless of which specific tools you implement.  

Azure’s native security tools are genuinely powerful, but implementing them effectively takes expertise and ongoing attention. If you’re migrating to Azure or looking to strengthen an existing environment, we can help you navigate the options and build a security posture that matches your actual risks.  

We’ve helped organisations across the UK implement smart cloud migration strategies that include security from day one, not as an afterthought. Get in touch to find out more.