Azure AZ-900 Fundamentals Exam

Assess Security and Compliance Requirements

When assessing security and compliance requirements for Azure, it's essential to understand the shared responsibility model. This model outlines which security tasks are managed by Microsoft and which are managed by you, depending on whether you're using IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. For all cloud models, you are responsible for your data, endpoints, accounts, and access management. This division helps ensure that both parties are clear on their roles in maintaining security. Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery are critical components for ensuring data protection and business continuity. Azure Backup provides a scalable solution to protect your application data with minimal costs, safeguarding against data corruption and human errors. Azure Site Recovery helps maintain the availability of workloads and apps during outages by orchestrating replication, failover, and recovery processes, ensuring that your operations can continue from a secondary location if needed. Encryption is a key aspect of securing data in Azure. Azure Disk Encryption uses BitLocker for Windows and dm-crypt for Linux to encrypt virtual machine disks, ensuring data is protected at rest. Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Column Level Encryption (CLE) for SQL VMs further enhance data security by encrypting data at the database level. These encryption methods are integrated with Azure Key Vault, which securely manages and stores cryptographic keys. Identity and access management are foundational to securing systems and data. Azure provides robust identity-based access controls, including Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Microsoft Authenticator, and Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). These tools help ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive information, and they provide flexible, customizable access management to meet various organizational needs. Antimalware solutions in Azure, such as Microsoft Antimalware, protect virtual machines from malicious software. These solutions offer real-time protection and configurable alerts to detect and remove threats. For enhanced security, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides advanced features like attack surface reduction, endpoint protection, and automated investigation and remediation.

By leveraging these Azure security features and understanding the shared responsibility model, you can effectively assess and meet your security and compliance requirements, ensuring that your data and applications are protected in the cloud.

Analyze Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud computing model where software applications are delivered over the internet on a subscription basis. This model allows users to access software from any device with an internet connection, making it highly accessible and convenient. SaaS providers manage the infrastructure, security, and maintenance, ensuring that the software is always up to date with the latest features and security patches. One of the key characteristics of SaaS is its subscription-based access. Users typically pay a recurring fee to use the software, which can be more cost-effective than purchasing and maintaining software licenses. This model also allows for automatic updates, meaning users always have access to the latest version of the software without needing to manually install updates. This reduces the burden on IT departments and ensures that all users are working with the most current tools. SaaS is particularly well-suited for applications that require collaboration and accessibility. Examples include email services like Microsoft Outlook, customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce, and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. These applications benefit from being accessible from anywhere, allowing teams to work together seamlessly regardless of their physical location. When evaluating the use of SaaS, it's important to consider the benefits and limitations. Benefits include reduced costs for hardware and maintenance, as well as the ability to scale usage up or down based on demand. However, there are also limitations, such as potential concerns about data security and the reliance on internet connectivity. Understanding these factors can help businesses make informed decisions about when to use SaaS solutions. In summary, SaaS offers a flexible, cost-effective, and accessible way to use software applications. By leveraging the cloud, businesses can reduce their IT overhead, ensure their software is always up to date, and enable their teams to collaborate more effectively.

Understanding the characteristics and use cases of SaaS is essential for making informed decisions about cloud computing solutions.

Evaluate Cost and Management Considerations

When evaluating cost and management considerations for different cloud models, it's essential to understand the unique features, benefits, and limitations of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Each model has distinct cost implications and management responsibilities that can significantly impact budgeting, resource allocation, and administrative overhead. IaaS provides the most control over the computing environment, allowing you to manage virtual machines, storage, and networking resources. However, this control comes with increased management responsibilities, such as configuring, patching, and maintaining the virtual machines. The cost structure for IaaS includes charges for compute resources, storage, and network usage, which can fluctuate based on demand. This model is ideal for scenarios requiring high customization and control, such as development and testing environments or extending on-premises datacenters. PaaS offers a more managed environment where the cloud provider handles much of the underlying infrastructure, including operating systems, middleware, and runtime. This reduces the administrative overhead and allows you to focus on developing and deploying applications. PaaS is cost-effective for applications that need to scale quickly and efficiently, as it simplifies resource management and reduces the need for extensive IT staff. However, it may offer less flexibility compared to IaaS, as you are limited to the configurations and services provided by the platform. SaaS delivers fully managed applications over the internet, with the cloud provider handling all aspects of the infrastructure, including software updates and security. This model minimizes management responsibilities and is typically billed on a subscription basis, making it easy to predict costs. SaaS is ideal for standard business applications like email, CRM, and collaboration tools, where customization needs are minimal, and ease of use is a priority. Understanding the shared responsibility model is crucial when evaluating these cloud services. In IaaS, you are responsible for managing the operating system, data, and applications, while the provider manages the physical infrastructure. In PaaS, the provider also manages the operating system and middleware, leaving you to handle only the application and data. In SaaS, the provider manages everything except for your data and user access.

By comparing the cost implications and management responsibilities of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, you can make informed decisions that align with your business needs and optimize your cloud investment. Each model offers different levels of control, flexibility, and cost, so it's important to choose the one that best fits your specific use case and organizational goals.

Understand Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. With IaaS, you can rent virtual machines (VMs) and other resources like storage and networking from a cloud provider such as Azure. This model offers the flexibility of virtualization without the need to invest in and maintain physical hardware. Azure Virtual Machines are a key component of IaaS, allowing you to deploy a wide range of computing solutions, including development and testing environments, disaster recovery, and lift-and-shift migrations. One of the primary benefits of using Azure Virtual Machines is the ability to run various operating systems and applications, such as Windows, Linux, SQL Server, and SAP, without worrying about the underlying hardware. This flexibility makes it easier to build and deploy applications while ensuring that your data is protected in highly secure datacenters. Security features include antimalware protection, disk encryption, and network security, which help safeguard your virtual machines from threats and ensure compliance with industry standards. Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery are essential services for maintaining business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). Azure Backup provides a scalable solution to protect your application data with minimal operating costs, while Azure Site Recovery helps orchestrate replication, failover, and recovery of workloads and applications. These services ensure that your virtual machines and data remain available even during planned or unplanned outages, making them crucial for any organization's BCDR strategy. Virtual networking is another critical aspect of IaaS, enabling virtual machines to communicate with each other and with on-premises networks. Azure Virtual Networks provide isolated environments for your deployments, ensuring secure and efficient network traffic management. Additionally, Managed Disks simplify storage management by handling the creation and scaling of storage accounts, allowing you to focus on your applications rather than infrastructure details.

In summary, IaaS on Azure offers a robust and flexible platform for deploying and managing virtual machines and other resources.

By leveraging services like Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and virtual networking, you can build secure, scalable, and resilient applications that meet your business needs. Understanding these core features and their use cases will help you make informed decisions when choosing the right cloud model for your scenarios.

Examine Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides a managed hosting environment, allowing developers to build, deploy, and manage applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. PaaS solutions in Azure, such as Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, offer several benefits including scalability, integrated development tools, and managed services. Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service that supports modern cloud applications. It is built on the latest stable SQL Server features and provides high availability, intelligence, and management capabilities. This service is ideal for applications that need to scale quickly and require minimal administration, as it handles tasks like patching, backups, and performance tuning automatically. Azure SQL Managed Instance is another PaaS offering that simplifies the migration of existing SQL Server applications to the cloud. It provides almost 100% feature parity with the SQL Server database engine, making it suitable for most migrations. Managed Instance offers additional capabilities such as native virtual network support and full SQL Server access, which helps in maintaining compatibility with on-premises SQL Server environments. PaaS solutions like Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance are particularly beneficial for use cases such as web application hosting, API management, and data analytics. These services allow businesses to focus on application development and innovation rather than managing infrastructure, leading to faster time-to-market and reduced operational complexity.

In summary, PaaS in Azure provides a robust, scalable, and managed environment for developing and deploying applications.

By leveraging services like Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance, businesses can achieve high availability, security, and performance while minimizing administrative overhead. This makes PaaS an excellent choice for modern cloud applications and migrations from on-premises environments.