I’ve seen environments fall apart because basic monitoring wasn’t in place. Attackers love flying under the radar. If you’re running Azure without Defender for Cloud, you’re giving them a free pass.
This isn’t optional; it’s your central nervous system for Azure security. Defender provides the unified security posture, vulnerability assessments for VMs, and crucial threat alerts for your critical assets like Storage, SQL, and Key Vault. Without it, you’re blind to misconfigurations and active threats.
Many organizations still only enable it partially or miss entire resource types. That’s a huge gap. You need to enable Defender plans for ALL resource types: Servers, Storage, SQL, Key Vault, App Service. This is the foundation.
To see your current Defender status: az security pricing list –query “[].{Name:name, Tier:pricingTier}” –output table
Then, enable it for key services (repeat for other types like AppServices, KeyVaults): az security pricing create –name VirtualMachines –tier Standard az security pricing create –name SqlServers –tier Standard
Don’t let your Azure environment become a silent hunting ground. Get Defender for Cloud fully deployed.
The fix
# Check Defender status
az security pricing list --query "[].{Name:name, Tier:pricingTier}" --output table
# Enable for key resources
az security pricing create --name VirtualMachines --tier Standard
az security pricing create --name SqlServers --tier Standard
az security pricing create --name StorageAccounts --tier Standard
Reference: CIS Azure Foundations Benchmark 2.1