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Backing up and recovering certificates, secrets, and keys are crucial for maintaining secure operations within your Azure environment. With the ever-present threat of data loss due to accidental deletion, malicious activity, or system failure, it’s vital for Azure administrators to understand the tools and strategies available for backing up sensitive information and how to recover it when necessary.
Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that provides a secure store for secrets, keys, and certificates. While Azure backs up Key Vault for disaster recovery purposes, these backups are for service recovery, not for customer data recovery. That’s why Azure recommends that you regularly back up your Key Vault content if you need to be able to restore items.
To back up a key, secret, or certificate in Azure Key Vault, you can use Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or the REST API.
Here’s how to back up a secret using PowerShell:
$filePath = “path_to_backup\my-secret.backup”
$secret = Backup-AzKeyVaultSecret -VaultName ‘MyKeyVault’ -Name ‘MySecret’ -OutputFile $filePath
Here’s the equivalent operation using the Azure CLI:
az keyvault secret backup –vault-name ‘MyKeyVault’ –name ‘MySecret’ –file ‘path_to_backup/my-secret.backup’
To restore a key, secret, or certificate from a backup, you will use the same tools.
Restore-AzKeyVaultSecret -VaultName ‘MyKeyVault’ -InputFile ‘path_to_backup\my-secret.backup’
az keyvault secret restore –vault-name ‘MyKeyVault’ –file ‘path_to_backup/my-secret.backup’
The Azure Recovery Services vault is a storage entity in Azure used to manage backup and recovery operations. It’s not directly used for key or secret backups but rather for virtual machine encryption keys when using Azure Backup.
Ensuring the resilience of your cryptographic assets using backup and recovery processes helps protect against data loss and provides peace of mind. By integrating these strategies into your security operations, you can assure the integrity and availability of your sensitive information within Azure.
Explanation: Azure Key Vault does not support automated backup and restore out of the box. Backups have to be performed manually by the user using Azure CLI, PowerShell, or the Azure portal.
Answer: c) Store certificates, secrets, and keys
Explanation: Azure Key Vault is a service that can be used to securely store and manage certificates, secrets, and keys.
Answer: d) All of the above
Explanation: Azure Key Vault secrets can be backed up to any secure location including locally, to another key vault, or an Azure Storage Account.
Explanation: Azure Backup service does not directly support backing up Azure Key Vault. Key Vault backup needs to be done manually or via customized automated methods.
Answer: d) Both a) and c)
Explanation: Azure Site Recovery is a service designed for disaster recovery of Azure VMs and on-premises VMs, not for backing up data in Azure Key Vault.
Explanation: When performing backups of Azure Key Vault, it is important to include both the keys and the corresponding metadata to ensure successful restores.
Answer: c) An encrypted blob containing keys, secrets, and certificates
Explanation: Azure Key Vault backup is an encrypted blob that contains keys, secrets, and certificates managed by the Key Vault.
Explanation: Azure Key Vault offers soft-delete and purge protection features that allow the recovery of deleted vaults and vault items for a specific configurable retention period.
Answer: b) To allow recovery of keys, secrets, and certificates within a retention period after deletion
Explanation: Soft Delete in Azure Key Vault is a feature that retains deleted keys, secrets, and certificates for a set retention period, allowing for their recovery during that time frame.
Answer: c) In the Key Vault properties
Explanation: The retention period for Soft Delete can be configured within the properties of the Azure Key Vault.
Explanation: Once Soft Delete is enabled on an Azure Key Vault, it cannot be disabled and the vault is permanently eligible for Soft Delete.
Answer: b) Purge protection
Explanation: Purge protection is a feature that helps prevent the permanent deletion of Azure Key Vault items. It adds an additional layer of security by requiring a specific privilege to purge, which is not enabled by default.
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