Plan a Lifecycle Strategy
Implementation Effort: Medium – Requires planning across onboarding, configuration, scaling, and decommissioning phases, involving collaboration between security, IT, and cloud architecture teams.
User Impact: Low – Lifecycle planning is handled by administrators and architects; end users are not directly affected.
Overview
Planning a lifecycle strategy in Microsoft Defender for Servers ensures that server protection is consistent, scalable, and aligned with organizational security goals. The lifecycle includes onboarding machines (Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-premises), configuring monitoring and protection policies, maintaining agent health, scaling deployments, and eventually decommissioning resources securely.
Key planning steps include:
- Selecting the appropriate Defender for Servers plan (Plan 1 or Plan 2) based on feature needs and cost.
- Onboarding machines using Azure Arc for hybrid and multicloud environments.
- Ensuring integration with Log Analytics workspaces and Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) for data collection.
- Defining governance for agent deployment, update management, and alert handling.
- Planning for decommissioning by removing agents, disabling plans, and cleaning up resources.
This strategy supports the "Verify Explicitly" principle of Zero Trust by ensuring that all machines are consistently monitored and protected throughout their lifecycle, reducing gaps in visibility and control.