Maintain Azure PCI Compliance with Less Effort and Expense

Is your enterprise required to keep your Azure PCI compliant? If so, then you must know how stressful it can be to provide evidence that the customer cardholder data you store in the cloud is handled according to the requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). To ensure data security and pass attestation of compliance (AOC), you need to start by monitoring sign-in activity and all changes to your Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) configuration, which controls entry to your cloud directory service.

Complying with PCI DSS by staying on top of Microsoft Entra ID access

Microsoft Entra ID is the gateways to the Microsoft Azure platform and its integrated cloud services. Securing Microsoft Entra ID is critical for maintaining cloud services operations, ensuring information security and passing payment card industry audit checks. Therefore, you need to protect it from unauthorized configuration changes and unwarranted logins. Microsoft Trust Center is a one-stop shop that helps you understand compliance in the Microsoft cloud and get targeted information.

To ensure Azure PCI compliance, you’ll need to align your Microsoft Entra ID security controls with the following payment card industry (PCI DSS 3.2) requirements for systems access management:

Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure systems and applications.

Requirement 8: Identify and authenticate access to system components.

Requirement 10: Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data.

In addition to controlling access, you need to secure the business-critical cloud services where PCI data can be stored. In particular, you need to adhere to the following DSS compliance requirements:

Requirement 3: Protect stored cardholder data.

Requirement 7: Restrict access to cardholder data by business need to know.

Requirement 12: Maintain a policy that addresses information security for all personnel.

Keeping your Azure PCI compliant with Netwrix Auditor for Microsoft Entra ID

When your next audit check comes around, you can be sure that you’ll be able to provide qualified security assessors (QSA) with all the necessary evidence that your Microsoft Entra ID is secure. Netwrix Auditor for Microsoft Entra ID delivers 360-degree visibility into security and configuration changes and reports on both successful and failed sign-ins, helping you ensure that no suspicious activity goes under your radar so you can protect your critical assets and avoid PCI DSS compliance failures. With Netwrix Auditor, you can:

• Stay on top of sign-in attempts in your Microsoft Entra ID to spot attacks, inappropriate access to sensitive data and privilege abuse.
• Streamline reporting with detailed predefined reports, including pre-built compliance reports mapped to the most common regulatory standards, such as PCI DSS, CJIS, FERPA, FISMA/NIST, GDPR, GLBA, HIPAA, ISO/IEC 27001 and SOX.
• Identify aberrant activity faster by subscribing yourself or security officers to the reports that each of you needs.
• Chase down suspicious actions and get to the root cause of security incidents in minutes with the Google-like interactive search.
• Be the first to know about critical changes or access attempts across your Microsoft Entra ID environment with custom alerts.
• Store your consolidated Microsoft Entra ID logs for over 10 years in the cost-effective two-tiered storage (SQL Server database + file-based) and access them any time you need to prepare for an upcoming audit check.