Data Protection with Azure and SDS

There has certainly been plenty of buzz in the development community around cloud computing. Along with the increased interest, there has also been a lot of question and concern over security and data protection. Specifically with Microsoft Azure and SQL Data Services (SDS), let’s take a look at some of the details related to data security and protection.

SDS is essentially a database as a service. That said, the first ‘security’ question may be, ‘How do I authenticate against a database and authorize functionality for applications?’ SDS will support the same authentication and authorization methods as SQL Server 2008. SQL authentication and logins are supported today, with Windows Integrated (A/D) coming. So, authentication and authorization will be no different than securing your data access on-premise or in a hosted environment.

The second question (probably asked by database and network administrators) may be, ‘How secure is the physical data storage?’ Azure services are maintained in robust data center environments. So again, physical data storage is equivalent to industry standards for hosted environments. It may very well be better protected than some corporate ‘data centers’, staffed by over extended resources who may not be experts in secure data storage and availability techniques.

Enough to convince you that your data will be secure in the cloud? Maybe not, but consider more of the benefits of Azure and SDS:

1. Authorization and authentication the same as on-premise and hosted solutions
2. Data protection, reliability and redundancy/availability similar to hosted solutions, but with better scalability
3. Geo Location: the ability to select which data center hosts your data and applications for improved performance
4. Ability to offload database and network administration expertise
5. True relational database features and functionality coming soon
6. Familiar database administration and development tools

If the other features of cloud computing offer measurable advantages to your organization, SDS may very well offer similar or improved data storage over on-premise or hosted options. Leveraging cloud services relies on some level of trust in the selected provider, both for compute and storage needs. If you consider Microsoft a trusted provider, their Azure services and features may very well meet or exceed your cloud service needs.