I have a customer who intends to host SSAS VM in Azure. How will they best be able to authenticate against it without connecting to their own corporate AD?
Can one setup AD for them in the Cloud only for this Authentication?. SSAS requires Windows Authentication. Client doesn't want to setup any on Prem configurations due to security reasons.
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I'm deploying my first VM in azure but I can only connect from Azure Joined devices, and I have some external users without company laptops that need to connect,
To increase the security, I'm deploying access control with MFA for this machine.
Thanks.
Scenario: We have an Azure cloud environment that contains three (Prod,Test,Dev) PaaS database servers (PostgreSQL Flexible Servers). Each server exists in its own VNet. The SQL data tables found in each server contain sensitive information. Let's say we require an external user (eg. a contractor, consultant) to access the data tables in a secure way, with MFA enabled. What would be a secure & simple way of enabling this?
Some options I can think of:
Share database server credentials with external user (high risk of credentials being misplaced. No MFA option?):
Whitelist user IP address against Azure firewalls
Send PaaS server credentials to external user via email or SMS.
They connect using an SQL client on their machine.
External user to use VM via Bastion:
Add external user to Azure AD
Turn on MFA for user in AD
Create VM in Azure, with SQL client software installed (ie. pgAdmin for PostgreSQL)
Configure access to the 3 PaaS servers (Prod, test, dev) from the VM
Set up Bastion server with access to VM
Enable user to access VM via Bastion server
Second option incurrs extaa costs for the VM and Bastion of course. Are there any other methods I should consider?
we have configured azure active directory pass-through authentication . Need to access on premise resources from the azure deployed application. can we do this by configuring application proxy?. so that on premise application authenticated with azure AD. so the communication between azure application and on premise application be seamless. Is it possible?
I'm not entirely sure if I understand you correctly but what you want is probably possible by using Azure Hybrid Connections: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/app-service-hybrid-connections
You install the Hybrid Connector on-prem, e.g. on a VM, and then for instance an Azure App Service can access certain resources on-prem.
Or for anything more advanced you might want to look at Azure VPN (or ExpressRoute in the long run).
For security concerns I'm planning to not allow Azure services to communicate with Azure services but the services it is only working with.
For example, I've some web apps that uses Azure SQL Databases. Should I only add the outbound IP addresses of Azure Web Apps in the Azure SQL server firewall?
or I need to do something else?
This is not as easy as it should be. SQL Azure is not designed to be virtual network friendly so your only options are "Allow all Azure services" or hard-coded IPs. Unless your web apps have static IPs however, this won't be possible without writing a custom updater for the database which picks up IP address changes.
You could install a SQL server onto a VM and use virtual private networks, otherwise, make sure the login credentials are secure and accept the fact that an Azure client from anyone could attempt to connect to your database server.
The best way to lock down your SQL Database is with AAD Integration, and Managed Service Identities. Azure will provision an AAD identity for your application, and only code running in that application will be able to generate an Access Token for that Identity. Then you can provision it as an AAD user in your SQL Server.
This has the (large) added benefit of removing the secrets from the application, so you don't have to configure your application with a Client Secret, or a SQL Login/Password.
You can also run your App on a VNet, and configure your SQL firewall to only permit access from that VNet using Virtual Network service Endpoints For Azure SQL Database.
Or use the newer and much better Private Link for Azure SQL Database.
Some of the ways to secure the connection to the sql database that could be considered in this case are -
As you mentioned you are already thinking of configuring a firewall to whitelist the allowed IP addresses. The firewall could be configured both on the sql server level and the database level(we can use SSMS to configure the firewall at the database level).
We can encrypt data. Of course this would be encryption at rest. And the good news is the application connecting to the database need not change to query encrypted data.
The third way would be the traditional way(even if we were not using azure db) we would prevent unauthorized access by creating users/roles/permissions.
A very nice feature I found Azure db provides is the Threat Detection Capability. If you turned that on we would be notified of the possible vulnerabilities of the current db/server setup. And also where can we make improvements to fix those issues.
Connect your Azure function with your SQL DB using private endpoints and VNET integration. Your app service will need to be standard or premium. Even Premium function plan will do. This LINK talks about it.
Authenticate your azure function on your SQL DB using managed identities. See this link for info on how to do that. Managed identities
In short yes.
You can possibly make this more secure by creating vnet connection from the web app and creating a service endpoint for SQL. I'm not sure that will work, but worth a try.
We are using on-prem and Azure cloud separately and planning to make connection between on-prem AD and Azure AD by using Azure AD connect or Pass-though authentication (preview).
My question is, If we use Azure AD connect or pass-though ,will there be any need to use Azure application proxy in any case?
Under what scenario/application integration, both application proxy and Azure AD connect/pass-through will be required?
If we use Azure AD connect or pass-though ,will there be any need to
use Azure application proxy in any case?
By default, there is no need to deploy a proxy for Azure AD connect. It depends on your local network, if your On-prem server(AAD connect installed) can connect to the internet direct, we should not deploy the proxy.
Under what scenario/application integration, both application proxy
and Azure AD connect/pass-through will be required?
This table describes the ports and protocols that are required for communication between the Azure AD Connect server and on-premises AD:
More information about hybrid identity required ports and protocols, please refer to this official article.
If your on-prem network can't open those ports, we need to deploy a proxy for it.