Blog Automation & Orchestration Azure
Last updated on May 17th, 2023 at 12:54pm
Automating and optimizing Azure provisioning involves creating and managing user identities and roles. Strategy and automation can handle much of the heavy lifting of user provisioning, especially as you scale up your organization's cloud in an Azure environment.
What are the Key Things to Consider When Planning Azure Provisioning?
User provisioning should be integral to your cloud strategy and planning from Day 1. Here are some key considerations for Azure provisioning to include in your strategic planning:
- Set consistent and meaningful naming conventions for Azure resources to help organize and manage resources effectively.
- Implement resource groups to organize and manage resources based on your organization's lifecycle, ownership, and application requirements.
- Determine the appropriate resource sizing and scaling options for resources based on application requirements and expected usage patterns.
- Ensure that resource availability and resilience avoid single points of failure and minimize downtimes.
- Ensure that resources are configured securely and compliant with relevant security and regulatory requirements.
Azure User Provisioning Best Practices
Following Azure user provisioning best practices makes operational sense in maturing cloud operations because it helps maintain a focus on security and compliance. Benefits also include best practices to help onboard new cloud team members and skill up team members who don't have experience managing cloud user provisioning.
Here are some Azure user provisioning best practices to consider.
Centralize User Information
Your organization should centralize all your Azure user information and ensure you can synchronize that information with Azure Active Directory (AAD) or a third-party Identity Access Management (IAM) solution. AAD is where any IAM policy your team authors resides.
AAD uses Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) for exchanging authentication and authorization data between an identity provider and a service provider. Major third-party IAM solutions also use SAML for authentication.
Use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Implement Azure RBAC to control who amongst your IT and cloud teams has access to create and manage user accounts in AAD to ensure that only authorized users have the access permissions to create or modify user accounts.
Use Secure Connections
All connections to AAD must be secure using HTTPS and SSL/TLS as your security standards.
Use Validation and Error Handling
Implement validation and error handling in your Azure provisioning process to ensure that data is accurate and that your cloud and security teams can detect errors and issues before they become a problem.
Monitor and Audit User Provisioning
Monitor user provisioning activities to identify any suspicious or unauthorized activities. Regularly audit user accounts to ensure that they are up-to-date and accurate.
Implement Conditional Access
Use conditional access policies to control access to AAD based on factors such as user location, corporate-owned versus personal devices, and user risk. Implementing conditional access can help prevent unauthorized access to user accounts.
Automating Azure Provisioning
Automating user provisioning in Azure can help your organization streamline its identity management processes, improve security, and reduce the risk of errors or inconsistencies. Here are some reasons why automating user provisioning in Azure is the right approach.
Improved Efficiency
Cloud user provisioning can be a tedious and manual task that can take away time from your cloud team that they could better spend on more strategic tasks. Automating Azure user provisioning can significantly reduce the time and effort your staff needs to spend creating and managing user accounts, allowing them more time to focus on tasks that can help improve your organization's cloud operations.
Increased Security
Cloud user accounts are a growing attack vector by criminals and state actors in cyberattacks. Following a best practices approach to security helps reduce the risks of security vulnerabilities and errors an attacker could leverage to breach your Azure cloud services. Automating Azure user provisioning helps ensure that your teams create and manage user accounts consistently and follow best practices.
Reduced Risk of Errors
Automating user provisioning can help reduce the risk of errors or inconsistencies that can occur when provisioning is done manually.
Consistency and Auditability
Automating user provisioning can help ensure user accounts are created and managed consistently, making auditing and monitoring user activity easier.
Improved Scalability
If your organization is in growth mode or requires onboarding/offboarding of contractors and partners for projects, automating user provisioning can help scale your IAM processes more efficiently to meet changing requirements.
Get Started with Azure User Provisioning
Once you have a user provisioning strategy in place, it's time to put it into action. A cloud user provisioning pilot is a natural first step, especially if your organization is implementing a cloud management platform (CMP) for the first time. Kion offers a robust cloud management platform with automation and orchestration features that provide you with the tools to enable Azure account creation, grant permissions, manage users, and ease many common Azure management tasks.
Upon completing your pilot and putting a launch plan in place, it's time to roll out your new cloud user provisioning solution to your broader organization. Roll out the solution department by department so you don't overtax your IT department, especially your service desk. Such a phased approach enables your team to catch any issues before they impact all your users. It also allows you to pay attention to user training support. There's also the opportunity to communicate any changes in processes or policies based on lessons your deployment teams learn.
Conclusion
Strategy and automation, culminating in a phased approach to Azure user provisioning, are keys to managing your Azure users in a single or multi-cloud environment while ensuring the security and compliance of your Azure resources.
