Fundamental best practices for securing VMs
In the next couple of sections, we will review the best practices for securing VMs from different angles (authentication, network access, patch management, and backup).
Regardless of the cloud provider you are using for VMs, you should follow the fundamental best practices, which are relevant to any VM that you will be deploying based on any of the hyperscale cloud providers:
- Use the latest hardware generation of VMs to gain the most performance, cost, and security capabilities.
- For highly sensitive environments, use a VM family that supports confidential computing capabilities, to protect data in use (as explained in Chapter 11, Applying Encryption in Cloud Services).
- Use a VM image from a trusted source. Most cloud service providers (CSPs) maintain up-to-date images of both Windows and Linux flavors for use by their customers.
- When creating a custom VM image, use a minimal number of packages inside the VM image to...
