Microsoft's Approach to Keeping Your Data Safe in Azure Active Directory

"Microsoft’s datacenter personnel must pass a background check. All access to our datacenters is strictly regulated and every entry and exit are monitored. Within these datacenters, the critical Azure AD services that store customer data are located in special locked racks—their physical access is highly restricted and camera-monitored 24 hours a day. Furthermore, if one of these servers is decommissioned, all disks are logically and physically destroyed to avoid data leakage."

"We limit the number of people who can access the Azure AD services, and even those who do have access permissions operate without these privileges day-to-day when they sign in. When they do need privileges to access the service, they need to pass a multi-factor authentication challenge using a smartcard to confirm their identity and submit a request. Once the request is approved, the users privileges are provisioned “just-in-time”. These privileges are also automatically removed after a fixed period of time and anyone needing more time must go through the request and approval process again."

-- Breach detection: We check for patterns that indicate breach. We keep adding to this set of detections regularly. We also use automated tests that trigger these patterns, so we are also checking if our breach detection logic is working correctly!

-- Penetration tests: These tests run all the time. These tests try to do all sorts of things to compromise our service, and we expect these tests to fail all the time. If they succeed, we know there is something wrong and can correct it immediately.

-- Audit: All administrative activity is logged. Any activity that is not anticipated (such as an admin creating accounts with privileges) causes alerts to be triggered that cause us to do deep inspection on that action to make sure it not abnormal.