Privacy of data for Azure Cognitive Speech Services - azure

In our company want to use the Azure Speech service for ASR of Kids' speech. In our agreement with the parents for this project (and also per company policy), we need to be sure the WAV data (and transcriptions) we send to Cloud based services like this one are not stored nor logged nor kept in any way by the service provider. i could not find information of what info is stored when we use the REST API or Speech API going to the Azure Speech service. any help appreciated.

In addition to the other comment, if you want to have complete control over the data and when it gets deleted you can create your own storage account and use Azure's Bring Your Own Storage feature. This way your speech services account use the storage account that you created for all storage instead of having its own internal storage.
You can then do something like setting up a storage policy that deletes everything inside the storage after x number of days to make sure nothing is being kept.

Related

Restore Azure Media Services' deleted assets

I wanted to know if it is possible to restore an asset in the Azure Media Services if it is deleted ? I haven't been able to find any officially supported solution for this.
Azure storage supports making backups and then copying back restores the blob. But is it possible to do the same thing in Azure Media Services and get the same assetID and locatorID as the original ones ?
As far as I know, azure media service does not provide back up and restore the assets in your account. Please refer to this article.
We currently don't provide an automated solution to backup the data in your media services account. You can query your media services account for the data you wish to back up and then write it in some sort of storage.
This is the feedback, you could post your idea to help to improve Azure Media Service.
Correct, we don't provide a backup or restore feature for Azure Media Services at this time. The storage account that is connected to AMS can be backed up - and you can configure geo-redundant storage as well.
We have some customers that configure multiple AMS accounts in two regions and upload content to both for High Availability if needed. You can easily create Assets and Streaming locators with the same IDs in two regions as well.

Rich ACLs with Azure Storage - delegating to AD?

How do I build a rich storage ACL policy system with Azure storage?
I want to have a blob container that has the following users:
public - read-only against some set of blobs
Uploader - read-write against some subset of blob names, these keys are shared out to semi-trusted build machines
shared admin - full capabilities against this blob subset
Ideally these users are accounts driven through Azure AD, so I can use the full directory service power with them... :)
My understanding of shared access keys is that they are (1) time-limited and (2) have to be created with hand-tooled code. My desire is that I can do something similar to AWS IAM policies on S3... :-)
Thing like AWS IAM Policies for S3 does not exist for Azure Blob Storage today. Azure recently started a Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and is available for Azure Storage but it is limited to performing management activities only like creating storage accounts etc. It is yet not available for perform data management activities like uploading blobs etc.
You may want to look at Azure Rights Management Service (Azure RMS) and see if it is a right solution for your needs. If you search for Azure RMS Blob you will find one of the search results link to a PDF file which talks about securing blob storage with this service (the link directly downloads the PDF file and hence I could not include it here).
If you're looking for a 3rd party service to do this, do take a look at the "Team Edition" of Cloud Portam (a service I am building currently). We recently released the Team Edition. In short, Cloud Portam is a browser-based Azure Explorer and it supports managing Azure Storage, Search Service and DocumentDB accounts. The Team Edition makes use of your Azure AD for user authentication and you can grant permissions (None, Read-Only, Read-Write and Read-Write-Delete) on the Azure resources you manage through this application.
Paul,
While Gaurav is correct in that Azure Storage does not have AD integration today, I wanted to point out a couple of things about shared access signatures from your post:
My understanding of shared access keys is that they are (1) time-limited and (2) have to be created with hand-tooled code
1) A sas token/uri does not need to have an expiry date on it (it's an optional field), so in that sense they are not time-limited and need not be regenerated unless you change the shared key with which you generated the token
2) You can use PS cmdlets to do this for e.g.: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn806416.aspx. Some storage explorers also support creation of sas tokens/uris statically without you having to write code for it.

Azure storage metrics data

I am trying to implement azure storage metrics code in my role but i am checking if there is easy way to get azure storage metric data about my files usage. my code is stable and i do not want to change code again.
Actually if you already have Windows Azure role running, then you don't need to make any changes to your code and you still can get Windows Azure Blob storage Metrics data.
I have written a blog about it last time as Collecting Windows Azure Storage REST API level metrics data without a single line of programming, just by using tools
Please try above and see if this works for you.
Storage analytics is disabled by default, so any operations against your storage up til now has not been logged for analysis.
You may choose to enable analytics at any time, for both logging (detailed access information for every single object) and metrics (hourly rollups). Further, you may choose which specific storage service to track (blobs, tables, queues) and which operations to track (read, write, delete). Once analytics are enabled, you may access the resulting analytics data from any app (as long as you have the storage account name + key).
Persistent Systems just published a blog post on enabling storage analytics for Java apps. The same principles may be applied to a .net app (and the sdk's are very similar).
Additionally, Full Scale 180 published a sample app encapsulating storage analytics (based on REST API, as it was written before SDK v1.6 came out).

Creating blob storage service programmatically in Azure

currently I'm playing around with Azure and thinking about a multi-tanent web app where users can create an instance of the app, where more users can register to upload and share files within this instance. I've created a blob storage service and created several containers. However, I'm not sure how customers may think about the fact, that they share their blob service with other users and files are only separated by containers. I would like that each user gets instead his own blob service. However the web app should be shared still by a single web worker role.
This sounds easy for every instance you create by hand, however I want the blob service to be created automatically as the user registers and creates his instance of the web app. Unfortunately I haven't found yet any information about how I could accomplish this. I've found only the blob storage api to query the service, not for creating it.
Can anybody lead me in the right direction? Is this even possible?
You can create a storage account programmatically (see "Create Storage Account": http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh264518.aspx), but I wouldn't recommend creating a different account for each user. The limit on how many storage accounts can be created per subscription is fairly low. (I believe the default is five and you can call to get your quota increased to twenty.)
In general, the recommendation is to go ahead and use the same storage account for all your customers. I believe your concern is about data security, but adding multiple storage accounts doesn't really change the security dynamic. (The trust boundary is still between you and the end user, since only your code will directly access storage.)

Getting Started with Azure Question

I'm trying to get up-and-going with Windows Azure. I understand that I need to create a "Storage Account". However, what I'm confused about is, how I should set it up. For instance, my Azure subscription is set to my company name. I intend to have multiple ASP.NET web applications (web roles) associated with my subscription. Each web application will have its own database.
My question is, should each web application have its own storage account? Or should only one storage account be used for all of my projects?
Thank you!
There's no one way to answer this, but here are some thoughts to help your decision:
Each storage account is limited to 100TB. If you feel that you will push the limits of this across multiple websites, then create multiple storage accounts for sure.
To make billing easier, I'd suggest separate storage accounts
Storage accounts have an SLA of a few thousand transactions per second across the entire storage account. For performance purposes, it's probably better to have separate storage accounts
Consider putting your diagnostic data in a separate storage account. This way, you can safely give your Storage Account key to a 3rd-party like ParaLeap (creators of AzureWatch) for monitoring your app, while not giving away the key to real customer data, for instance.
If you need more than 5 storage accounts, you'll need to contact Customer Support to increase this number.
Windows Azure Storage server is for simple blob storage. This is for when your app needs a file store. Any application, not just Azure web roles, can target a storage service. It's kind of like Amazon S3 if you're familiar with that.
Storage services are not required to run Azure applications. You just need a "compute" instance.

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