Infrastructure security in the Microsoft Zero Trust Workshop

In a Zero Trust architecture, infrastructure security focuses on protecting the foundational compute and platform resources that host applications and services across multicloud and on-premises environments. Rather than implicitly trusting infrastructure, this pillar ensures that servers, containers, storage, and platform services are continuously assessed, hardened, and monitored under an assume-breach mindset.

Infrastructure pillar guidance focuses on managing security posture, protecting workloads at runtime, governing infrastructure configurations, controlling administrative access, and integrating infrastructure signals into security operations.

Workshop implementation

The Infrastructure workshop covers the implementation areas summarized in the table.

Area Details
Establish infrastructure security posture management Continuously assess infrastructure resources for misconfigurations, policy violations, and exposure risks.

Use posture management capabilities to identify configuration drift, enforce governance policies, and prioritize remediation across cloud and hybrid environments.
Protect compute workloads across virtual machines and containers Secure multicloud virtual machines, container environments, and hybrid environments using workload protection capabilities.

Continuously monitor security posture, detect threats, and remediate vulnerabilities affecting compute workloads.
Secure and govern platform services and control planes Apply security controls to platform services such as storage, databases, and application services.

Govern access, configurations, and exposure of platform resources to reduce risk across cloud control planes.
Assess and manage vulnerabilities Continuously scan infrastructure resources for vulnerabilities and configuration issues.



Prioritize and remediate findings based on risk, and tune alerts to reduce noise while maintaining visibility.
Control access to infrastructure resources Enforce least-privilege access using role-based access control (RBAC) and just-in-time (JIT) access.

Integrate identity-based access controls to ensure administrative access is granted only when required and scoped appropriately.
Harden configurations and enforce security baselines Define and apply secure configuration baselines across infrastructure resources.

Standardize settings for compute, networking, and platform services to prevent misconfigurations and ensure consistent protection.
Monitor workloads and detect threats at runtime Continuously monitor infrastructure for suspicious activity and security threats.

Use runtime protection and analytics to detect attacks targeting virtual machines, containers, and platform services.
Integrate infrastructure signals into security operations (SecOps) Stream posture findings, runtime alerts, and threat signals into centralized monitoring and response systems.

Correlate infrastructure data with identity, device, network, and data signals to support investigation and response.

Next steps

Begin the Infrastructure workshop.