Set Up Security Policies
Implementation Effort: Medium – Setting up security policies involves selecting, customizing, and assigning standards across cloud environments, which requires coordination between security, compliance, and cloud operations teams.
User Impact: Low – This is a backend configuration task; end users are not directly affected unless policy enforcement impacts resource configurations.
Overview
Security policies in Microsoft Defender for Cloud define the rules and standards used to assess and improve your cloud security posture. These policies are built on security standards, which include Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB), regulatory compliance standards (e.g., ISO, NIST, PCI-DSS), and custom standards tailored to your organization’s needs.
Defender for Cloud evaluates resources in Azure, AWS, and GCP against these standards and generates security recommendations to guide remediation. You can modify built-in standards, assign regulatory frameworks, or create custom policies using Kusto Query Language (KQL) to define specific conditions and remediation steps.
This setup supports the Zero Trust principle of "Verify Explicitly" by continuously assessing configurations and enforcing compliance with defined security baselines across all cloud environments.