Security is always an important aspect for any deployment and solution. It has become much more important and relevant because of deployment onto the cloud. Moreover, there is the increasing threat of cyber attacks. In these circumstances, security has become a focal point for organizations. No matter the type of deployment or solution—whether it's IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS—security is needed across all of them. Azure data centers are completely secure and they have a dozen international security certifications. They are secure by default. They provide IaaS security resources such as NSGs, network address translation, secure endpoints, certificates, key vaults, storage, and virtual machine encryption, and PaaS security features for individual PaaS resources. Security has a complete life cycle of its own and it should be properly planned, designed, implemented, and tested, just like any other application functionality.
Monitoring is an important architectural aspect for any solution. It is also the first step towards auditability. It enables operations to manage a solution, both reactively and proactively. It provides the necessary records for troubleshooting and fixing the issues that might arise from platforms and applications. There are many resources in Azure that are specific to implementing monitoring for Azure, other clouds, and on-premise data centers. Application Insights, OMS, and Log Analytics are some of the most important resources in this regard. Needless to say, it is a must for making your solutions and products better by innovating based on insights from monitoring data.