Azure Deployments Tend To Be IT-Centric, Not Cloud-Centric

A lot of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service deployment in Azure tends to be IT-centric rather than cloud-centric due to Microsoft's relationships with traditional enterprises, said Kaushik Narayan, CTO of McAfee's cloud business unit. Narayan said data on Azure therefore tends to be private, and less accessible over the internet than AWS environments.

As a result, Kaushik said attacks over the network are slightly less likely with Azure than with AWS. Instead, Kaushik said components like the Azure Cosmos DB database service tend to be more of a target for hackers since they're open to the internet.

The sheer isolation of traditional computing systems provides a lot of protection, but that isolation of private data can be lost in Azure even if it's unintentional, said John Dodds, McAfee's director of product management. Businesses are more likely to be susceptible to risks they haven't thought much about such as having sensitive data sitting in Cosmos, Dodds said.