15 Powerful Azure Features That You Cannot Ignore in 2023

Overview

The idea behind this listicle is to introduce to the readers 15 most popular Azure features and their details in a lucid manner. Hope you will enjoy reading this listicle.

1. Azure

Azure means “shade of blue (color of the sky.)”

One liner: Azure portal deploys and manages Microsoft Azure workload resources.

What is Azure Portal?

Azure Portal is a web-based interface Microsoft provides for managing and accessing various services and resources within the Azure cloud platform. It is a central hub for users to create, deploy, monitor, and manage their Azure resources, including virtual machines, storage accounts, databases, and networks.

You can find this feature at: https://portal.azure.com

2. Microsoft Sentinel

Sentinel means “Placed to keep watch and guard against attack.”

One liner: Microsoft sentinel is a single glass SIEM + SOAR solution pane.

What is Microsoft Sentinel?

Microsoft Sentinel, also known as Azure Sentinel, is a cloud-native feature for SOAR-security orchestration, automation, and response and SIEM- security information and event management and solution offered by Microsoft. It is designed to help organizations detect, investigate, and reciprocate security threats and incidents across their entire enterprise.

3. Azure Bastion

Bastion here means “protective wall against an attack which allows defensive traffic outside.”

One Liner: Azure Bastion is used to remotely access Virtual Machines without public IP. RDP/SSH port is open.

What is Azure Bastion?

Azure Bastion: It is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering from Microsoft Azure that provides secure and seamless remote access to Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) over the Secure Shell (SSH) and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) protocols.

4. Microsoft Purview

Purview means “Scope/limit/extent of something.”

One liner: Microsoft Purview portal helps in compliance management.

What is Microsoft’s Purview?

Microsoft Purview is a data governance solution offered by Microsoft. It is designed to help organizations discover, manage, and govern their data assets across various sources and platforms. Purview provides a unified and holistic view of data, enabling users to understand the data, its location, and its use.

You can find this feature at: https://compliance.microsoft.com

5. Entitlement Management

Entitlement here means “your right or you have right to the things.”

One Liner: Entitlement Management is part of identity Governance, an Azure Active Directory IAM tool feature.

What is Entitlement Management?

Entitlement Management in Azure refers to a set of capabilities and services provided by Microsoft Azure to manage access permissions and entitlements for various resources and applications within an organization. It allows administrators to define fine-grained access policies and delegate access management to users or groups while maintaining control and security.

You can find this feature at: https://portal.azure.com

6. Compliance Score

Compliance means “to follow the rules/standards.”

One Liner: Compliance score quantitatively measures the adherence to how many rules/standards from the total required.

You can find this feature at: https://compliance.microsoft.com

7. Identity Governance

Governance means “to control.”

One Liner: Identity Governance deals with controlling the lifecycle of identity.

Identity Governance is a feature of the Azure Active Directory IAM tool.

What is Identity Governance?

Identity Governance in Azure refers to the practices and tools designed to manage and secure user identities and access to Azure resources. It allows organizations to control and govern the lifecycle of user identities, their permissions, and the resources they can access within Azure.

You can find this feature at: https://portal.azure.com

8. Data Sovereignty

Sovereignty means “power/authority to control.”

One Liner: Data Sovereignty means ensuring that customer data stored in Azure Data Centre are subjected to legal policies for government and law enforcement requests for data.

What is Data Sovereignty?

In the context of Azure, data sovereignty refers to the concept that customers have control over the geographical location where their data is stored and processed within the Azure cloud infrastructure. Azure provides various data center regions worldwide, and data sovereignty in Azure allows customers to choose the specific region where their data will reside.

9. Microsoft Defender

Defender means “protector or to protect.”

What is Microsoft Defender?

Microsoft Defenders protect cloud applications, endpoints, identities, office 365, and workloads. Along with this, many Microsoft Defenders are also there, like Microsoft Defender for IoT.

You can find this feature at: https://security.microsoft.com

10. Controls

Controls here means “rules/standards.”

What are Controls in Azure?

Controls are critical elements of Compliance Manager in the Purview portal—assessment of these Controls against standard templates. The result of the assessment consists of improvement actions for the Compliance Score.

11. Orchestration

The orchestration here means “Conduct/manage something difficult with many components.” e.g., like coordinating live and huge music orchestra. Microsoft Sentinel is a tool to orchestrate action against incidents using playbooks for automation.

12. Shadow IT

Shadow IT means “uninformed/unauthorized use of any digital service/device.”

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is used to find the presence of shadow IT to strengthen the Cloud workload environment.

You can find this feature at: https://security.microsoft.com

13. Azure AD Tenant

Tenant here means “organizational Identities related data which occupies cloud space.”

Azure portal helps to create Multiple tenants.

You can find this feature at: https://portal.azure.com

14. Microsoft Entra

Entra means “the power of admittance or the authority to admit new entry/entity.”

Microsoft Azure provided AAD (Azure Active Directory) as an IAM tool (Identity & Access Management). Microsoft Entra Admin portal provided various IAM-related features like AAD, Verified ID, and Permission Management.

You can find this feature at: https://entra.microsoft.com

15. Microsoft Azure Data Estate

Data Estate is a platform designed by Microsoft to store Organization’s data. A data estate ingests, stores, prepares, models, serves, and visualizes data to produce insights that can support, boost and even transform operations.

References

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/azure

https://www.daymarksi.com/information-technology-navigator-blog/how-azure-sentinel-works

http://www.bastions.com.my/about-bastion-consulting/

Data Sovereignty at the Edge | IBM

https://news.microsoft.com/apac/2019/12/23/data-estate-a-winning-formula-for-the-new-decade/

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