Think your data in Azure is safe just because it’s “in the cloud”? Think again. If your VM disks aren’t encrypted at rest with ADE, you’re leaving a gaping hole for anyone who gets access to the underlying storage. It’s a fundamental control, yet I still see too many organizations skip it.
An attacker with access to your storage accounts or even a compromised VM can easily exfiltrate unencrypted disk images. ADE with customer-managed keys (CMK) is your last line of defense here. It means even if the storage is breached, the data remains unreadable.
This isn’t rocket science, it’s basic hygiene. You need to enable ADE for all your Azure VM disks. For new VMs, it’s a part of the provisioning process. For existing ones, you’ll need to enable it retrospectively, often with a reboot. For CMK, you’ll integrate with Azure Key Vault.
Stop rolling the dice on data confidentiality. Get this done.
The fix
# Check encryption status\naz vm encryption show --resource-group <rg> --name <vm_name>\n# Enable on VM\naz vm encryption enable --resource-group <rg> --name <vm_name> \\\n --disk-encryption-keyvault\
Reference: CIS Azure Foundations Benchmark 7.2