Data Privacy Day 2018: Top 7 Services on Cloud that help ensure data privacy

As cloud computing transforms the way organizations use, store, and share data, applications and workloads, on Data Privacy Day 2018, Microsoft reiterates its commitment to ensuring that your data remains only yours, without exception.

Microsoft’s industry leadership in data privacy protection has been recognized for over a decade, beginning with the establishment of its trustworthy computing principles: security, privacy, compliance and transparency, and continuing into its ongoing endeavour to create secure services that are built-in rather than a bolt-on.

Security and personal privacy threats are increasing in volume and sophistication every day, and more and more data and applications are moving to the cloud.

This creates unique info-security challenges that need to be constantly addressed through the best security stack that protects data. Microsoft recommends that organizations ensure their cloud providers have the following seven services across all workloads:

1. Centralized policy management
2. Continuous security assessment and actionable recommendations
3. Advanced cloud defences
4. Prioritized alerts and incident reporting
5. Unified security and privacy management
6. Advanced threat protection
7. Mechanisms for encryption, secrets administration, and access control that can be leveraged for managing sensitive data

These capabilities can combine to provide an unparalleled compliant foundation to help ensure control over the integrity, privacy, and security of your critical data.

Regardless of an organization’s size or the industry, Microsoft’s Azure Security Center threat detection capabilities alert, and recommended fixes helps protect your cloud resources from unwanted threats. With Azure Security Center, companies can apply security policies across entire workloads, limit exposure to threats, as well as detect and respond to attacks, thus protecting organisational and individual privacy.

Microsoft software development teams apply a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure, throughout the company’s development and operational practices which revolve around:

• Privacy by Design - to enable informed decision-making
• Privacy by Default - to protect by means such as access control lists in combination with identity authentication mechanisms
• Privacy in Deployment - to establish appropriate privacy and security policies for users
• Communications - by publishing privacy policies, white papers, and other documentation pertaining to privacy

Maintaining information security and privacy is a continuous process that spans both, on-premises datacenters and your cloud environment. In 2018, cyber-security enabled privacy will be of core importance to Microsoft as they enable the digital transformation of Indian business.