When implementing a solution architecture (on-premise or in the cloud) the aspect of protecting your data and your identity from malicious attacks is always one of the first things to consider, and especially because of the cloud's nature to be considered as a shared resource, things like identity management, access control, and privacy management must have a very high priority on your design.

Cloud computing security can be defined as a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls deployed to protect data, applications, and the associated infrastructure of cloud computing (Wikipedia).

Implementing security in the cloud is quite similar to implementing security on-premises, the only difference being that in the cloud, you don't have the costs of maintaining the hardware infrastructure and you have the facilities that the cloud platform gives security features built-in without extra costs (the main cloud vendors such as Microsoft with Azure have a strong and always updated security platform).

When designing an application for the cloud, there are three main aspects to check:

• The application must restrict access to only authorized users
• The application must be designed and deployed securely and data protection must be guaranteed
• Sensitive data should always be protected

In order to improve the security of your Azure cloud infrastructure, there are some patterns and best practices that can be implemented when planning for a solution. In the upcoming sections, we'll see an overview of each of them.