Technical Review of Microsoft Azure Report 2022

Running head: TECHNICAL REVIEW OF MICROSOFT AZURE
Technical Review of Microsoft Azure
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Table of Contents
Introduction:....................................................................................................................................2
Concept, Definition and the Features of Microsoft Azure:.............................................................2
Microsoft Azure in Cloud Computing:............................................................................................4
Review of the Microsoft Azure:......................................................................................................6
Conclusion:......................................................................................................................................7
References:......................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction:
In the current aspect of the emerging technology, cloud computing is one of the vital
area. The cloud computing is considered as on-demand availability of the computer resources.
Mainly, two type of resources are considered here. First resource is the computing power
resource and the second one is storage resource. Various of organizations are currently
implementing the cloud computing technology for improving their businesses operations as it
provides several of advantages to the organization. Though, the cloud computing holds various
of advantages for the organization, one of the important concern that is related with the cloud
computing is security technology used for the cloud computing. There are several security
technologies are available for the cloud computing. This report will mainly discuss about the
Microsoft Azure which is one important security technology for the cloud computing services
(Swanstrom 2018). In this report a brief discussion will be done regarding this Microsoft Azure
and important aspects of this technology will be discussed.
Concept, Definition and the Features of Microsoft Azure:
The Microsoft Azure is a specific type of cloud computing service which has been
developed by the Microsoft for building, deploying, testing, and for managing services and
application through the data centres that are managed by Microsoft.
The Microsoft Azure is one important solution for the cloud security. The basic concept
of the Microsoft Azure is totally based on the PaaS or the Platform as a Service. This platform is
mainly used for the building and hosting the solutions by the use of Microsoft’s products and the
data Centre (Basak et al. 2017). The Azure is actually a comprehensive suite of the cloud
products and it is mainly used by the developers for the development of enterprise-class

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application while the developers does not need to build any type of infrastructure. The Azure
platform of Microsoft is consisting three important cloud centric products. These three products
are the SQL Azure, Windows Azure and the Azure app fabric controller. These are some of the
important additions for the infrastructure facility of application hosting. The Microsoft Azure
service platform is one largest part of the cloud computing initiative of Microsoft. The Windows
Azure which is a part of the overall Azure system is a specific type of operating system which is
mainly designed for providing scalable storage and compute services (Karthikeyan 2017). The
OS is itself supported by the Azure App Fabric. The Azure App Fabric is collection of different
kind of tools that re mainly used for supporting the application in the cloud. The SQL Azure
provides the facility of data management and storage management services. The SQL Azure is
actually quite similar with the conventional relational database services.
There are various of features that are provided by the Microsoft Azure. Computational
service is one of the most important feature that is provided by the Microsoft Azure. The
computational services of the Microsoft Azure help the developers to publish and manage the
applications and the websites very easily. Here, the users do not need to worry about the
computational power. Another important feature of the Microsoft Azure is the storage related
services (Kumar et al. 2016). Here, the Microsoft Azure provides the feature of online data
storage and access through the SMB protocols and the REST APIs. Also, mobile related services
are another important feature of the Microsoft Azure. The Microsoft Azure also provides the
environment of mobile application, development, distribution and the beta-testing. Data
management and media services is also some of the vital feature of the Microsoft Azure. The
Azure uses SQL Data Warehouse for handling the data intensive queries on the datasets which
are larger than 1 TB (Kotas, Naughton and Imam 2018). In this way, appropriate data

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management is achieved for the users. The PaaS offerings of the Microsoft Azure ensures
protection of the content, streaming, encoding and analytics which are important media feature
of the Microsoft Azure.
The other important feature of the Microsoft Azure is the CDN feature and the machine
learning feature. The CDN or the content delivery network is specific type of delivery system
used by the Azure for the delivering the audio, images, application and videos. This is specific
type of delivery which is capable of enhancing the performance of overall system. For the
management of CDN REST based HTTP APIs are used by the Microsoft Azure (Mrozek,
Daniłowicz and Małysiak-Mrozek 2016). Machine leaning is also a very crucial feature provided
to its users. The machine learning of the Microsoft Azure is capable of data interaction and
predictive analytics through the natural speech recognition.
Microsoft Azure in Cloud Computing:
The security technology of the Microsoft Azure plays a crucial role in the aspects of
cloud computing. There are several of built-in services with the Microsoft Azure which helps to
ensure the security of the cloud computing services. In Microsoft Azure there are unparalleled
security intelligence which helps regarding identification of rapidly evolving threats at very early
stage (Taneja et al. 2017). In this way, it ensures that quick response can be taken against these
identified threats. The services of the Microsoft Azure implements layered and in-depth defence
strategy across data, identity, networks and hosts. The unify security management of the
Microsoft Azure establishes an advanced threat protection across cloud environments which are
hybrid in nature.

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To ensure the cloud computing security, Microsoft Azure uses various types of
customized hardware systems. These hardware systems have specific security controls integrated
within it and not only the hardware systems, but also the firmware components do have this
integrated security control. These security control ensures the protection against the DDoS
threats. The workloads in the cloud environment is protected through the Microsoft Azure by
using the built-in controls. The Azure security centre ensures the continuous protection of the
cloud environment with having the deeper insights (İnci et al. 2016). The Microsoft Azure also
provide the feature of extended protection to the hybrid environments and it can easily integrate
the partner solutions within Azure. The Microsoft Azure is capable of detecting the threats early
and one of the important reasons of it is the unique intelligence of the Azure. The Microsoft
Azure provides real-time global cybersecurity intelligence at the cloud scale and it is one
important behind that the Microsoft Azure is capable of identifying the threats early. Also, the
machine learning, application-based intelligence and the behavioural analytics plays a vital role
in this context (Cloud 2019). Using these three data scientists of Microsoft is capable of
analysing the data within Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. Gathered results from this
analysis informs the services in Azure and ensure that all the threats are detected in the early
stage within the cloud computing environment.
It has been assessed that the Microsoft Azure is one of the effective solutions for ensuring
the cloud computing security. Though, it is one of the effective solutions, there are several of
issues and challenges are associated with the Microsoft Azure. The main challenge that is
associated I this case is regarding the migration. While organizations need to migrate their data
to the Azure cloud, they can face several of critical challenges (Kohli 2018). Main challenge will
be associated with the Windows Azure where important issues will arise and that includes

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prevention against the cyber-attacks, availability, secure data access, scalability issues and
compatibility issues. Other than these technical issues there are several of other issues also which
are the planning related issues and staff management related issues. Also, migration in Azure
requires appropriate compliance and app integration which can be another issue related with
utilization of the Microsoft Azure.
Review of the Microsoft Azure:
Considering the cloud computing security technologies, the Microsoft Azure is one of the
effective solutions in this context. There are four very important security feature that is provide
by the Microsoft Azure. The virtual network gateway of the Microsoft Azure ensures a secure
network for the users in the cloud computing environment. Key log protection is another security
feature of the Microsoft Azure where all the keys are encrypted through 256-bit AES encryption
(Harfoushi and Hasan 2018). Also, proper security against the malwares is another important
security feature of the Microsoft Azure. Lastly, access management is another important security
measure that is employed by the Microsoft Azure.
The existing design of the Microsoft Azure includes a massive collection of the
networking and server hardware. These collection of the hardware acts as a host of complex
collection of the applications which is capable of controlling configuration and operation of the
software and the virtualized hardware within the servers (Madhuri and Sowjanya 2016). This
design of the Microsoft Azure makes the platform very much powerful.
There is some important procedure that needs to be followed for the implementation of
Microsoft Azure. First it is very much important to understand the overall sensitivity of the
application from the business perspective. Following that VNET needs to be designed for the

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Azure (Chatterjee and Nygard 2017). The next step is deployment of the virtual machines. In the
following stage development and testing related operations are done and finally services are
deployed within the Azure environment.
From the analysis it has been identified that there are several of limitations are also
present with the Microsoft Azure. One of the important limitations of the Microsoft Azure is lack
of integrated backup. Another limitation of the Microsoft Azure is the poor tools and GUI
management of its. It has been assessed that present iteration of the Microsoft Azure
Management Console is very much difficult to work with (Copeland 2017). The response rate of
this is very much slow. Again, the Microsoft Azure solution does not provide any type of access
to the Windows Client Images which is another limitation of this cloud computing security
technology. Lastly, provisioning of the virtual machines in the cloud is another important
limitation as it takes a higher amount of time.
Conclusion:
From the above discussion it can be concluded that Microsoft Azure is one of the
effective technologies that can be employed for the cloud computing security. In this report a
technical review has been presented regarding the Microsoft Azure. In this report the concept,
definition and the features of the Microsoft Azure has been evaluated. In the following section of
the report, investigation has been done regarding how the Microsoft Azure can be used in the
aspect of cloud computing related security. Issues and important challenges have been also
evaluated in this section. The current security issues trends that are associated in this case are the
data breach, insufficient access management, insecure APIs, account hijacking and system
vulnerabilities. Regarding all of these issues technical development has been done much further

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and the Microsoft Azure is one of them which has helped regarding minimising these security
issues.

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References:
Basak, A., Venkataraman, K., Murphy, R. and Singh, M., 2017. Stream Analytics with Microsoft
Azure: Real-time data processing for quick insights using Azure Stream Analytics. Packt
Publishing Ltd.
Chatterjee, A. and Nygard, K., 2017, July. Predicting Stock Close Price Using Microsoft Azure.
In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social
Networks Analysis and Mining 2017 (pp. 749-757).
Cloud, A.E.C., 2019. Microsoft Azure.
Copeland, M., 2017. Cyber Security on Azure: An IT Professional’s Guide to Microsoft Azure
Security Center. Apress.
Harfoushi, O. and Hasan, D., 2018. Amazon Machine Learning vs. Microsoft Azure Machine
Learning as Platforms for Sentiment Analysis.
İnci, M.S., Irazoqui, G., Eisenbarth, T. and Sunar, B., 2016, December. Efficient, adversarial
neighbor discovery using logical channels on Microsoft Azure. In ACSAC (Vol. 10, pp.
2991079-2991113).
Karthikeyan, S.A., 2017. Introduction to Azure Automation. In Azure Automation Using the
ARM Model (pp. 1-23). Apress, Berkeley, CA.
Kohli, H., 2018. Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions Study & Lab Guide Part 2: Exam 70-
535. Independently published.

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Kotas, C., Naughton, T. and Imam, N., 2018, January. A comparison of Amazon Web Services
and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms for high performance computing. In 2018 IEEE
International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) (pp. 1-4). IEEE.
Kumar, R., Ball, T., Lichtenberg, J., Deisinger, N., Upreti, A. and Bansal, C., 2016, June.
CloudSDV enabling static driver verifier using Microsoft azure. In International Conference on
Integrated Formal Methods (pp. 523-536). Springer, Cham.
Madhuri, T. and Sowjanya, P., 2016. Microsoft Azure v/s Amazon AWS cloud services: a
comparative study. International Journal of Innovative Research in Science, Engineering and
Technology, 5(3), pp.3904-3907.
Mrozek, D., Daniłowicz, P. and Małysiak-Mrozek, B., 2016. HDInsight4PSi: Boosting
performance of 3D protein structure similarity searching with HDInsight clusters in Microsoft
Azure cloud. Information Sciences, 349, pp.77-101.
Swanstrom, R., 2018. Workshop 1: Data Science in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure ML.
Taneja, S., Karthik, M., Shukla, M. and Sharma, H.K., 2017. AirBits: A Web Application
Development using Microsoft Azure. ICRDSTHM-17) Kuala Lumpur, Malasyia.