AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Exam

Enforce Backup Vault Compliance with Azure Policy and Defender for Cloud

Azure Policy and Microsoft Defender for Cloud form the foundation for automating compliance checks on your Recovery Services vaults. By applying policy initiatives, you can continuously audit vault configurations and automatically remediate settings that drift from your standards. Defender for Cloud enriches this process with built-in security recommendations, helping you align with industry and regulatory baselines. Together, they ensure your backup infrastructure stays secure and consistent across the entire Azure environment.

To guarantee that backup data remains protected at rest and in transit, enforce encryption with customer-managed keys (CMK) and enable infrastructure-level encryption for an added security layer. You can configure:

• Platform-managed keys (PMK) for default at-rest encryption
• Customer-managed keys (CMK) stored in Azure Key Vault for full key ownership
• Transport Layer Security (TLS) to secure data in motion

These settings ensure end-to-end encryption and keep your backups compliant with critical governance standards.

Controlling who can access and modify backups is just as important as encrypting the data itself. Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to assign users the least privilege they need. Use Resource Locks or immutable vaults to prevent accidental or malicious configuration changes. Enable Soft Delete and Multi-user Authorization (MUA) with the Resource Guard to ensure backups remain recoverable for 14 days and require multiple approvals for destructive operations.

Finally, monitoring and alerting close the compliance loop and enable rapid response to threats. Turn on Backup integrity monitoring and configure Diagnostic Settings to send logs to an Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace. Forward key events to Azure Sentinel to leverage:

• Defender for Cloud alerts for suspicious backup actions
• Azure Policy audit logs for non-compliant vault configurations
• Sentinel playbooks to automate incident investigation and remediation

This integrated setup provides real-time threat detection, centralized logging, and orchestrated response to keep your backup environment resilient.

Conclusion

The solution begins by using Azure Policy and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to enforce consistent vault configurations and automatically remediate any deviations. This combination ensures that all Recovery Services vaults adhere to your organizational and regulatory requirements.

Next, the summary addressed how to implement layered encryption strategies with platform-managed keys, customer-managed keys in Azure Key Vault, and TLS for in-transit protection. These measures guarantee end-to-end encryption and give you full control over how backup data is secured.

Access is locked down through RBAC, Resource Locks, immutable vaults, Soft Delete, and Multi-user Authorization, preventing unauthorized changes and ensuring critical operations require multiple approvals.

Finally, backup integrity monitoring and Diagnostic Settings feed logs into Azure Monitor and Azure Sentinel, where alerts and playbooks provide rapid detection and response. Together, these controls form a comprehensive approach to safeguarding Azure backups from misconfiguration, tampering, and potential data loss.