As businesses have realized the potential of data, the technology used to manage and analyze it has become an essential component of the modern tech stack. By combining various data management and storage methods, Microsoft’s Azure Synapse Analytics assists business intelligence in discovering new avenues of profit and improving existing ones.
In this article, we’ll go over the essentials of Azure Synapse Security by covering the following topics:
What is Azure Synapse Security?
Microsoft’s Azure Synapse Analytics is a flexible platform for ingesting, storing, and analyzing data from many different sources. This service analyzes data and provides recommendations about how you can use it to improve operational procedures and ultimately increase company profit. Given that some of the processing occurs internally, you can also put this data to good use in services geared toward developing machine learning models.
The Azure Synapse workspace includes a wide variety of other tools aside from Synapse Analytics so you can perform any data operation quickly. It provides links to various data archives and generators. With Azure Synapse, you have access to a full suite of analytic life cycle capabilities, including:
- Apache Spark Pool for big data processing
- Data Explorer for log and time series analytics
- Dedicated SQL Pool for enterprise data warehousing
- Pipelines for data integration runtime
- Serverless SQL pool, formerly SQL DW, for data exploration over Azure Data Lake
- Deep integration with Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI
More so, it gets optimized for use with the help of:
- Data Explorer analyzes time series and log information.
- Spark enhances the performance of big data analysis applications.
- SQL offers business data storage.
It uses pipelines to make ETL/ELT procedures easier and help with data integration.
When to Use Azure Synapse Analytics
Microsoft has mentioned the following as some potential applications of Azure Synapse:
- Increasing the productivity of factories by performing centralized data analysis in a single location, providing a comprehensive overview of the supply chain.
- Improving the preservation of patients’ data by correlating the information to disease symptoms and, as a result, providing treatment recommendations.
- Analyzing real-time client data, thus enhancing customer service and ensuring customers can access all the assistance they require.
- Protecting your consumers from identity theft and account takeover with real-time alerts about suspicious activity in customer-managed user accounts.
The Azure Synapse Architecture
The Azure Synapse Workspace Architecture consists of the following:
Database Templates
Database templates simplify and speed up data modeling. These templates include operational, commercial, or transactional data tables, columns, and relationships. They are also tailored to specific industries, such as the financial sector, the insurance sector, the retail sector, and others.
After selecting a database template, you can edit tables, columns, and relationships. Then, machine learning models analyze the data and provide valuable insights and conclusions for the company.
Synapse Studio
Synapse Studio provides the ideal environment to develop practical solutions for data analysis in a short frame. The Synapse Studio handles data, Big Data, and AI management, including preparation, administration, exploration, and storage.
Synapse SQL
Synapse SQL extends the possibility for real-time and machine learning applications by serving as a T-SQL query engine for data storage and display.
5 Best Practices for Azure Synapse Security
Always follow Azure Synapse Security best practices to ensure adequate security in your Azure Synapse environment. So, here are five best practices to get you started with securing your Azure Synapse environment:
1. Implement a System of Multiple Authentication
Protecting against phishing and brute-force attacks, which are always possible, requires a more robust authentication mechanism. A perfectly safe system is impossible to build, but you can make a very powerful one.
Secure your Azure authentication using Azure’s built-in directory service, Azure Active Directory. Just keep in mind, a user account that uses Azure Active Directory authentication must also have Multi-Factor Authentication turned on.
2. Secure Access for Administrators
Unlimited access accounts are extremely vulnerable to attacks. Thus, timely audits, effective user management strategies, and checks of administrative accounts are necessary.
Access to your business may be monitored, analyzed, and managed with the help of Highly Privileged Identity Management, an Azure Active Directory service. To use it, users must go through an activation process that temporarily elevates their privileges to those of an administrator.
3. Avail of the Microsoft Azure Security Center
Assuming you are not up to speed on security best practices, your best bet is Azure Security Center. This option is preferred by companies concerned with security and can afford the service’s higher upfront and ongoing costs.
In addition, you may use it to keep an eye on and assess your virtual appliances and network settings. Ultimately, Azure Security Center is a centralized hub where you can find all the advice and guidance you need to keep your Azure environment safe and secure.
4. Track Alerts from Your Activity Log
The activity logs are essential in determining whether or not any threats compromised the system. Because every incident that goes unnoticed has the potential to cause serious problems, it is in everyone’s best interest to spot those events in advance. You should set up some activity log alerts in your system so that it can tell you of any security risks. Also, implement consistent auditing procedures to ensure that you know who has access to the data, when, and what queries they are running on what data.
5. Strategic Key Management
Passwords and other sensitive data should always be encrypted into keys for security. These are far safer and can get used as a password for any protection. However, keys must be encrypted and stored safely to prevent misuse or loss. Thus, protecting data stored in the cloud requires secure key management.
Conclusion
Azure Synapse’s flexibility and integration options make it a great solution for covering data-related business activities, from ingestion to analysis. Its focus on safety also makes it a useful tool for avoiding the stress that comes with manual solutions to problems that can be solved automatically.
Satori can optimize your Azure Synapse Security with ease by enabling easy to implement user management strategies and effective auditing and access control capabilities.
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