Azure SQL – It’s already in there already: Security

I’m not saying you have to be in the cloud. I’m not saying you have to be on premises, either.  In fact, I’m more saying “you need to be where it’s right for you and your environment.”  Some of my clients make sense to stay on-prem.  Some should be in the cloud – yesterday.  Still many others need to exist in both worlds.   There are many “flavors” of cloud – Infrastructure as a Service; Platform as a Service; AWS; Azure; Google’s Cloud; etc.  I want to take a few posts and videos over the next few months here and there to talk to some of the knee-jerk reactions against Platform-as-a-Service – and AzureSQL in particular. Again, not saying you must be here – and for many of my clients the answer may be, “you shouldn’t be there.”.  One objection I hear, though, is, “well, will this thing be as secure as my hosted environment?! I’ll lose control? What sort of protections will we have?”  I have a few answers for that, and I may have a few more videos with more answers. Here’s one angle though…  Does your on-prem environment tell you when there is an anomalous login from a location you weren’t expecting a login to come from?  Azure SQL Database does. Here’s a quick video about that. Want to learn more about Azure SQL DB?  I’ll be speaking at the Azure Data Fest in Burlington, MA on Thursday, March 1, 2018.  I’ll be sharing my presentation, “Azure SQL Database: A Guided Tour” and walk through the Azure SQL portal with you.  There will be a lot of Microsoft speakers, other MVPs and experts in all things Azure.  Come find out about what’s been going on the up in the Microsoft cloud.

A Couple of the Technologies I Covered in this Video

Azure SQL Database Threat Detection – In short, this is cool stuff.  It’s only getting cooler over time.  Microsoft has taken lots of years of experience, lots of best practices, Machine Learning, AI and many data points and built some tools for automatically detecting patterns that should be of concern to you today.  You may pay penetration testing firms to look for these flaws already, and sometimes they find them for you…  They are today looking for SQL Injection patterns of attacks, vulnerabilities to SQL injection in your code and “anomalous logins” – that is logins which had the right passwords, but came in through a location or IP that doesn’t follow the pattern.  Neat stuff.  They talk about it on their documents page for it.  Check it out. SQL Vulnerability Assessment –  In preview mode, but neat.  Looks at your compliance readiness, your privacy standards compliance and gives you some tools and tips to help make sure you are on track.  Do you do that today?  Do you pay for third-party tools to do that today?   Check it out. With a lot of the things we worry about (or should worry about), Microsoft is really trying to make the answer be, “yeah, it’s already in there already” in their cloud offerings.