Managing workloads across multiple clouds is now a strategic necessity for enterprises. However, multi-cloud environments often introduce complexity: fragmented visibility, inconsistent security controls, and operational overhead. For IT leaders and administrators running AWS workloads but invested in Microsoft’s ecosystem, Azure offers a powerful solution. By extending Azure’s governance, monitoring, and security capabilities into AWS, you can achieve a unified operational model without sacrificing agility.
At Velocity Technology Group, we help organisations leverage Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Sentinel to bring AWS under the same management and security umbrella as Azure.
This architecture enables:
Azure Arc projects AWS resources such as EC2 instances and EKS clusters into Azure Resource Manager, enabling centralised governance.
Technical details:
Arc-enabled servers require the Azure Connected Machine agent, deployed via AWS Systems Manager or Terraform. EKS clusters use the Arc Kubernetes agent for GitOps-based configuration and Azure Policy enforcement. Arc uses HTTPS for communication and requires IAM roles for automation.
Use case:
A global retailer applied Azure Policy to enforce disk encryption and disable public IPs on EC2 instances, reducing compliance drift and audit failures.
Azure Monitor aggregates telemetry from AWS workloads, providing a single pane of glass for performance and health metrics.
Technical details:
The Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) collects performance data and syslog from EC2 instances. Data Collection Rules (DCRs) route telemetry to Log Analytics Workspace. Managed Grafana visualises AWS and Azure metrics together.
Use case:
A financial services firm used Azure Monitor to correlate CPU spikes with network throughput issues in AWS-hosted trading apps, reducing latency by 30%.
Defender for Cloud integrates AWS accounts for continuous security posture management and threat protection.
Technical details:
AWS accounts are onboarded via the multicloud connector using CloudFormation. Defender evaluates resources against CIS benchmarks and integrates with AWS Security Hub. Defender for Servers provides vulnerability assessment and file integrity monitoring, but does not include endpoint detection and response (EDR) on AWS EC2 alone. To achieve EDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint must also be deployed on Linux or Windows EC2 instances. This distinction is critical for organisations expecting full endpoint protection.
Defender also supports agentless scanning for EC2 instances, reducing deployment overhead.
Use case:
A healthcare provider achieved HIPAA compliance by using Defender for Cloud to remediate misconfigured S3 buckets and weak IAM policies automatically.
The recommended method for AWS log ingestion into Microsoft Sentinel is the AWS S3 Data Connector, which uses Amazon S3 and Amazon SQS for secure, scalable integration.
Technical details:
This approach eliminates the need for Kinesis Firehose and provides a fully automated ingestion pipeline.
Use case:
A SaaS company implemented the AWS S3 connector to ingest CloudTrail and GuardDuty logs into Sentinel. They used KQL queries to correlate AWS API calls with Azure AD sign-in anomalies, triggering automated playbooks to block suspicious IPs and enforce MFA—reducing incident response time from hours to minutes.
A unified multicloud strategy delivers tangible benefits for IT teams. First, having a single control plane for AWS and Azure resources means administrators can manage virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and policies across both platforms from one interface. This eliminates the need to switch between consoles, reduces operational complexity, and ensures consistent governance.
Second, achieving a unified security posture across clouds is critical for compliance and risk management. By applying the same security benchmarks, vulnerability assessments, and threat detection rules across AWS and Azure, organisations can close gaps that attackers often exploit in fragmented environments.
Third, centralised monitoring for proactive issue detection transforms how IT operations teams respond to performance challenges. Instead of relying on siloed dashboards, telemetry from AWS and Azure flows into a single analytics workspace, enabling faster root-cause analysis and predictive insights that prevent outages before they occur.
Finally, automated incident response to accelerate resolution ensures that security teams can act immediately when threats are detected. With integrated SIEM and SOAR capabilities, alerts from AWS services like GuardDuty can trigger playbooks in Microsoft Sentinel, blocking malicious IPs or enforcing MFA without manual intervention—reducing response times from hours to minutes.
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