Forum Discussion
ASC Security Policies & Compliance Wording
Hi GlavniArhivator,
thanks for asking these great questions, I'll try to answer them in the respective order using a numbered list.
- Regulatory compliance is part of the ASC Standard tier, whereas Secure Score comes with the ASC free tier. Today, we do not map the compliance assessment results to your Secure Score.
- The Azure Security Benchmark is not exactly the same, as the CIS 1.1.0 benchmark we have integrated in ASC. However, its controls are consistent with other well-known security benchmarks, such as CIS 7.1. You can find more information about the Azure Security Benchmark at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/benchmarks/overview.
- Benchmarks and Azure Policy are not the same. You can see Azure Policy as the tool for technically implementing auditing of security benchmarks. So, the recommendations you see in your Security Controls in the Resource Security Hygiene part of Azure Security Center are derived from well-known security benchmarks and the technical implementation under the hood is based on Azure Policy. In other words: we are using Azure Policy to create the recommendations you see in Azure Security Center, but these recommendations are based on industry-standard security best-practices.
- No, this is not possible today. The security policy Azure Security Center relies on is scoped to the Management Group or Subscription level.
Best regards,
Tom Janetscheck
Senior Program Manager
CxE | Azure Security Center
MicrosoftHi GlavniArhivator,
thanks for asking these great questions, I'll try to answer them in the respective order using a numbered list.
- Regulatory compliance is part of the ASC Standard tier, whereas Secure Score comes with the ASC free tier. Today, we do not map the compliance assessment results to your Secure Score.
- The Azure Security Benchmark is not exactly the same, as the CIS 1.1.0 benchmark we have integrated in ASC. However, its controls are consistent with other well-known security benchmarks, such as CIS 7.1. You can find more information about the Azure Security Benchmark at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/benchmarks/overview.
- Benchmarks and Azure Policy are not the same. You can see Azure Policy as the tool for technically implementing auditing of security benchmarks. So, the recommendations you see in your Security Controls in the Resource Security Hygiene part of Azure Security Center are derived from well-known security benchmarks and the technical implementation under the hood is based on Azure Policy. In other words: we are using Azure Policy to create the recommendations you see in Azure Security Center, but these recommendations are based on industry-standard security best-practices.
- No, this is not possible today. The security policy Azure Security Center relies on is scoped to the Management Group or Subscription level.
Best regards,
Tom Janetscheck
Senior Program Manager
CxE | Azure Security Center
Hi Tom
Many thanks for your answer. ASC looks very simple but actually it's much more magic behind:) I have a few follow-up questions to your answers.
- How does it then come that many of the CIS 1.1.0 i also see in the recommendations? Am I right that many but not all of the regulatory compliance advices are in the recommendations which in the end effect impact the secure score?
- Ok, i see that they are not the same. But i don't see the connection between them and the baseline from the AZ-500 learnings and the best practices. Are they all connected?
- Ok, so I understand it like that: the idea of ASC recommendations isbased on the benchmarks and best practices and Azure Policy is just used to make them visible in a technical perspective.
Would you recommend here to not only remediate them but also to create new Policy or even Azure Blueprint for future deployments in order to have the secure score stable? - Yes, that was was my question, if I could do exceptions for a specific resource group:)?
Many thanks in advance!
- Tom_Janetscheck
Hi GlavniArhivator,
it's all about the details
Regarding your follow-up questions:
- The recommendations you see in the Resource Security Hygiene part of ASC, and which influence your secure score, are derived from several sources, benchmarks, and best practices. That said, if they apply to the CIS1.1.0 benchmark, they will also appear there.
- I currently don't have insights into what baselines are the source of AZ-500, but in the end, the learnings from this exam also reflect real-life best-practices (such as make sure your accounts are protected with MFA, NSGs are important for network security, and so on).
- You understand this correctly. Furthermore, if you take a look at the Azure Policy Initiative itself, you might see policies which appear as having non-compliant resources, but in ASC they are not shown. This is because ASC uses some other backend mechanisms besides Azure Policy only. For example, if a recommendation does not apply to a third-party firewall appliance which basically is a Linux VM, the Policy might say that this resource is non-compliant, whereas ASC will tell you that the recommendation does not apply to that resource. So, for your security policy, you should always look to ASC instead of the respective Azure Policy Initiative. Regarding the second part of your question: this is something many customers are asking for and this is why I've published a dedicated article to describe how Secure Score affects governance concepts. I would highly recommend to not only remediate security controls, but at the same time, to make sure you either have Deny or DINE (Deploy if not exists) policies or Azure Blueprints in place that will make sure your future resources are deployed secure by default, or to change your deployment pipeline (ARM templates, PowerShell scripts, Terraform templates,...) accordingly. You should make sure to have policies and deployment scripts in sync, not to create conflicts during deployment.
- We're currently working on a capability like this, but there's no ETA, yet.
I hope, this helps?
Thanks and best,
Tom
Thanks Tom. Everything is perfectly answered, but the first is not so clear.
Or maybe i didn't explained well. e.g. in the Azure CIS 1.1.0 I see a Control "7.1 Ensure that "OS disk" are encrypted" and below the "Disk encryption should be applied on virutal machines" security control which is in the recommendations. When i remediate them, then i have an effect on secure score. Two things I need to clarify here: does it mean that some of the regulatory compliance points are same as recommendations (or similar) but not all? And genrally spoken , I though that both ASC and Indusitry & regulatory standards policies (Azure CIS1.1.0, ISO 27001, SOT TSP and so on) do create recommendations which impact my secure score?
The other side is: If regulatory compliance policies does not have an impact on secure score, How to handle that "Regulatory compliance assessment" or on which level to pay attention on it?. At this moment it looks like secure score with his gamification and direct remediations impacts is much more relevant than to follow regulatory compliance?
Best regards!- Tom_Janetscheck
Hey GlavniArhivator,
sorry for confusing you - let me try to explain it differently:
The regulatory compliance part of ASC is another view to security risks. If you, for example, take a look at the CIS 1.1.0 control 7.1 Ensure that OS disks are encrypted, and you then go to the underlying recommendation "Disk encryption should be applied on virtual machines"; once you remediate this recommendation, you will gain credit towards your Secure Score if, besides this recommendation, you have made sure that all other recommendations in the same Security Control (Enable encryption at rest) have also been remediated. So, in order to increase your Secure Score, it's not enough to remediate the recommendation only, but from the perspective of the respective compliance standard, it is.
If you then, for example, take a look at the SOC TSP set of controls, you will find CCE-numbers underneath C1.2. These refer to vulnerabilities that have been found on machines within the scope of the policy.
SOC TSP
There is no single recommendation or Security Control for these in the Resource Security Hygiene part of ASC, but you will find them underneath the Vulnerabilities in security configuration on your machines should be remediated recommendation, which is part of the Remediate security configurations security control.
Remediate vulnerabilities
We have customers that need their resources to comply to different regulatory compliance standards. With the Regulatory Compliance dashboard, it is easy for them to find all settings that need to be configured so their resources will be compliant. We are mapping security recommendations to the topics that need to be taken care of when applying the compliance standard to an environment. So, with the compliance dashboard, it is easier to plan for which recommendations to focus on first in order to get the environment compliant, and then focus on remediating all the other recommendations and security controls. Once you remediate the recommendations from the Regulatory Compliance dashboard, they will also be remediated and count towards your Secure Score (but again: for receiving credits towards your Secure Score, all recommendations within a Security Control need to be remediated for a particular resource).
So, to make sure your environment is as secure as possible, you should try to get the Secure Score to 100%. If you achieve this, your compliance assessments will also reflect this achievement. If you focus on increasing your Secure Score, the recommendations that pop up in the different regulatory compliance assessments will automatically show less non-compliant resources.
At the end, Secure Score is the main KPI for how secure an environment is. The compliance dashboard gives you another view on your environment.
Best regards,
Tom