Monat: August 2019

Reducing SAP implementations from months to minutes with Azure Logic Apps

It's always been a tricky business to handle mission-critical processes. Much of the technical debt that companies assume comes from having to architect systems that have multiple layers of redundancy, to mitigate the chance of outages that may severely impact customers. The process of both architecting and subsequently maintaining these systems has resulted in huge losses in productivity and agility throughout many enterprises across all industries.

The solutions that cloud computing provides help enterprises shift away from this cumbersome work. Instead of spending countless weeks or even months trying to craft an effective solution to the problem of handling critical workloads, cloud providers such as Azure now provide an out-of-the-box way to run your critical processes, without fear of outages, and without incurring costs associated with managing your own infrastructure.

One of the latest innovations in this category, developed by the Azure Logic Apps team, is a new SAP connector that helps companies easily integrate with the ERP systems that are critical to the day-to-day success of a business. Often, implementing these solutions can take teams of people months to get right. However, with the SAP connector from Logic Apps, this process often only takes days, or even hours!

What are some of the benefits of creating workflows with Logic Apps and SAP?

In addition to the broad value that cloud infrastructure provides, Logic Apps can also help:

Mitigate risk and reduce time-to-success from months to days when implementing new SAP integrations.
Make your migration to the cloud smoother by moving at your own speed.
Connect best-in-class cloud services to your SAP instance, no matter where SAP is hosted.

Logic Apps help you turn your SAP instances from worrisome assets that need to be managed, to value-generation centers by opening new possibilities and solutions.

What's an example of this?

Take the following scenario—an on-premises instance of SAP receives sales orders from an e-commerce site for software purchases. In order to complete the entirety of this transaction, there are several points of integration that must happen—between the on-premises instance of the SAP ERP software, the service that generates new software license keys for the customer, the service that generates the customer invoice, and finally a service that emails the newly generated key to the customer, along with the final invoice.

In this scenario, it is necessary to move between both on-premises environments and cloud environments, which can often be tricky to accomplish in a secure way. Logic Apps solves for this by connecting securely and bi-directionally via a virtual network, ensuring that data stays safe.

Leveraging both Azure and Logic Apps, this solution can be done with a team of one, in a minimal amount of time, and with diminished risk of impacting other key business activities.

If you’re interested in trying this for yourself, or learning more about how we implemented this solution, you can follow along with Microsoft Mechanics as they walk through, step-by-step, how they implemented this solution.

How do I get started?

Azure Logic Apps reduces the complexity of creating and managing critical workloads in the enterprise, freeing up your team to focus on delivering new processes that drive key business outcomes.

Get started today:

Logic Apps

Logic Apps and SAP
Quelle: Azure

Azure Security Center single click remediation and Azure Firewall JIT support

This blog post was co-authored by Rotem Lurie, Program Manager, Azure Security Center.​

Azure Security Center provides you with a bird’s eye security posture view across your Azure environment, enabling you to continuously monitor and improve your security posture using secure score in Azure. Security Center helps you identify and perform the hardening tasks recommended as security best practices and implement them across your machines, data services, and apps. This includes managing and enforcing your security policies and making sure your Azure Virtual Machines, non-Azure servers, and Azure PaaS services are compliant.

Today, we are announcing two new capabilities—the preview for remediating recommendations on a bulk of resources in a single click using secure score and the general availability (GA) of just-in-time (JIT) virtual machine (VM) access for Azure Firewall. Now you can secure your Azure Firewall protected environments with JIT, in addition to your network security group (NSG) protected environments.

Single click remediation for bulk resources in preview

With so many services offering security benefits, it's often hard to know what steps to take first to secure and harden your workload. Secure score in Azure reviews your security recommendations and prioritizes them for you, so you know which recommendations to perform first. This helps you find the most serious security vulnerabilities so you can prioritize investigation. Secure score is a tool that helps you assess your workload security posture.

In order to simplify remediation of security misconfigurations and to be able to quickly improve your secure score, we are introducing a new capability that allows you to remediate a recommendation on a bulk of resources in a single click.

This operation will allow you to select the resources you want to apply the remediation to and launch a remediation action that will configure the setting on your behalf. Single click remediation is available today for preview customers as part of the Security Center recommendations blade.

You can look for the 1-click fix label next to the recommendation and click on the recommendation:

Once you choose the resources you want to remediate and select Remediate, the remediation takes place and the resources move to the Healthy resources tab. Remediation actions are logged in the activity log to provide additional details in case of a failure.

Remediation is available for the following recommendations in preview:

Web Apps, Function Apps, and API Apps should only be accessible over HTTPS
Remote debugging should be turned off for Function Apps, Web Apps, and API Apps
CORS should not allow every resource to access your Function Apps, Web Apps, or API Apps
Secure transfer to storage accounts should be enabled
Transparent data encryption for Azure SQL Database should be enabled
Monitoring agent should be installed on your virtual machines
Diagnostic logs in Azure Key Vault and Azure Service Bus should be enabled
Diagnostic logs in Service Bus should be enabled
Vulnerability assessment should be enabled on your SQL servers
Advanced data security should be enabled on your SQL servers
Vulnerability assessment should be enabled on your SQL managed instances
Advanced data security should be enabled on your SQL managed instances

Single click remediation is part of Azure Security Center’s free tier.

Just-in-time virtual machine access for Azure Firewall is generally available

Announcing the general availability of just-in-time virtual machine access for Azure Firewall. Now you can secure your Azure Firewall protected environments with JIT, in addition to your NSG protected environments.

JIT VM access reduces your VM’s exposure to network volumetric attacks by providing controlled access to VMs only when needed, using your NSG and Azure Firewall rules.

When you enable JIT for your VMs, you create a policy that determines the ports to be protected, how long the ports are to remain open, and approved IP addresses from where these ports can be accessed. This policy helps you stay in control of what users can do when they request access.

Requests are logged in the activity log, so you can easily monitor and audit access. The JIT blade also helps you quickly identify existing virtual machines that have JIT enabled and virtual machines where JIT is recommended.

Azure Security Center displays your recently approved requests. The Configured VMs tab reflects the last user, the time, and the open ports for the previous approved JIT requests. When a user creates a JIT request for a VM protected by Azure Firewall, Security Center provides the user with the proper connection details to your virtual machine, translated directly from your Azure Firewall destination network address translation (DNAT).

This feature is available in the Standard pricing tier of Security Center, which you can try for free for the first 60 days.

To learn more about these features in Security Center, visit “Remediate recommendations in Azure Security Center,” just-in-time VM access documentation, and Azure Firewall documentation. To learn more about Azure Security Center, please visit the Azure Security Center home page.
Quelle: Azure