Azure Database Authentication and Auditing covers two topics that bookend Azure database security. We start by looking at the advantages of using Azure Active Directory authentication side-by-side or in place of traditional database logins. Then we see how to implement Azure SQL authentication with Azure AD credentials. Auditing is a database’s security backstop of last resort, enabling administrators to investigate data and server issues. We see how Azure database auditing technology, inherited from SQL Server, has been adapted to the cloud environment and integrated with Azure’s event reporting.
Learning Objectives
- Overview of Azure SQL authentication
- Implement Azure database authentication with Azure AD credentials
- Overview Azure database auditing
- Implement auditing to an Azure storage account
- Implement auditing to Log Analytics
Intended Audience
- Students working towards the AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies exam
- Those wanting to learn how to use Azure Active Directory to authenticate Azure databases and implement database auditing in the Azure ecosystem
Prerequisites
- Students should be familiar with Active Directory concepts such as managed identities and role-based access control
- Familiarity with database concepts, while not essential, will be helpful
Hi, and welcome to this Azure Database Authentication and Auditing course. My Name is Hallam Webber, and I'm an Azure instructor with 25-plus years of experience in the IT industry, and since 2014 I've focused on Microsoft Azure cloud technologies.
This course is intended for students who want to learn about using Azure Active Directory to authenticate with Azure databases and auditing functionality available with Azure-hosted databases. The information presented in this course will be helpful to students preparing for the AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies exam.
While authentication and auditing may seem unrelated, these two topics bookend database security. You, an application, or a service need to authenticate with a database before accessing its data, and auditing monitors for nefarious or suspicious activity. We’ll start by looking at why you’d want to authenticate with Azure AD and how to do it before moving on to implementing Azure’s database auditing technology.
This is an intermediate-level course where we’ll be referencing Azure Active Directory and role-based access control, with the assumption you know what these are. I’ll be keeping database content to a minimum, only talking about topics that are directly related to authentication and auditing. While you won’t need to be an SQL expert, you should be familiar with basic database concepts.
When I created this course, all information was current. If you have any feedback, positive or negative, or if you notice anything that needs to be updated or corrected, please reach out to us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Let’s start by looking at Azure database authentication.
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.