September | 2019 | Coding Out Loud

Today I had the opportunity to speak at VT Code Camp #11 in Burlington, VT. As part of my series of talks on Running Azure Securely, my talk today was around defense in depth and was called Running Azure Securely – which of these Azure security features are for me?. The session was interactive, engaging a half-dozen folks in the audience in a discussion of how to defend various workloads using the (fictitious) page of photos app as a foil.

Some Resources Mentioned

Azure is in 54 regions around the world
Which services support Managed Identities? (works with Azure Active Directory – AAD)
Azure Sentinel (SIEM) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sentinel/overview
Azure Playbooks (automated actions from Azure Security Center): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security-center/security-center-playbooks
Not mentioned, but might be of interest (more structured than the interactive format used today): https://blog.codingoutloud.com/2019/09/14/talk-running-sql-azure-securely-sql-saturday-877-14-sep-2019/

The deck

VermontCodeCamp-BillWilder-2019-Sep-28.AllTheseSecurityFeatures

Talk description

Azure offers thousands of security features. Some of them are easy to use and others are complicated. Some are free to use and some look really, really expensive. Which ones should I be using for my applications?

In this talk we’ll look at some ways to reason about which security controls you might want to apply and why. We’ll consider groups of Azure security features through a pragmatic lens of security best practices and defense-in-depth/breadth, but tempered by the reality that “more security” is not always the answer, but rather “what is the right security” for a situation. By the end of this talk you should have a better idea of the security feature set offered by Azure, why/when they might or might not be needed, and have discussed some ways to reason about how which are relevant you by helping you think about how to assess appropriately for multiple situations.

Do you have specific questions about the applicability of Azure security features already? Feel free to tweet your questions at Bill in advance to @codingoutloud and he’ll try to work answers to any questions into the talk in advance.

Action Photo

(if I can find one)

Talk description

If you know your way around SQL Server, then you will find Azure SQL Database to be familiar territory. But some aspects are more familiar than others, which is especially true for security-related differences.

In this session we review the key differences around identity management and authentication (including multi-factor authentication), managing server credentials (or, even better, not needing to in some cases), how to audit logins (probably not what you expect), an overview of encryption and data masking options, and the supporting role of Azure Key Vault. We will also touch on compliance and disaster recovery to give the complete picture of powerful features you’ll definitely want to know about to protect your data.

This talk will cover relevant capabilities for both traditional Azure SQL Databases and the newer Azure SQL Managed Instances.

This talk assumes you are already familiar with SQL Server or another enterprise database.