Tips & Tricks To Secure and Optimize Azure VMs

This is the third and final part in a series where I look at Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) virtual machines (VMs) in Microsoft Azure. Part one covered the basics of creating a VM, and setting up networking, backup and monitoring before deploying VMs. In part two I covered VM families and sizes, how to pick the right size, running multiple VMs in Availability Sets, picking storage options and choosing between the two options for disk encryption. Here I'll look at secure ways of accessing your Windows or Linux VMs, Just-in-Time (JIT) access, Azure Security Center, Azure Backup, optimizing networking for VMs, automating creation of VMs, and tips and tricks for managing VMs running in Azure. One important thing that I glossed over in the first two articles is how to access your VM. The default setup gives you RDP access (Windows) or SSH (Linux). I'll bet that you don't have RDP/SSH access directly from the Internet to your production VMs on-premises today, though. So what's the best way to handle that in Azure?