Governance and security for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance

This article provides key design considerations and best practices for governance, security, and compliance to help you plan and implement Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance deployments. While the enterprise-scale landing zone documentation covers governance and security as separate topics, these critical design areas are consolidated into a single topic for Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

Architecture

The following diagram shows a conceptual reference architecture that depicts the security, compliance, and governance design areas for Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance:

Design considerations

This section contains design considerations you should keep in mind while planning the security and governance of your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

Review the security and governance design areas of the Azure landing zones to assess the effect of Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance on your overall governance and security models.

Governance disciplines

• Review the resource organization critical design area for best practices on enforcing governance in your landing zone.
• Review and enforce your organization's naming convention for your hybrid resources like the Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance, Data Controller, and the Custom Location.
• Review the built-in configuration profiles for Indirectly Connected mode and decide if any custom profiles are needed according to your Kubernetes infrastructure.

Data privacy and residency

• Consider which Azure regions you plan to deploy your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance and Data Controllers within based on your security and compliance requirements, taking into consideration any data sovereignty requirements. Understand what data is collected from your resources in Directly and Indirectly Connected mode, and plan accordingly based on the data residency requirements of your organization.

Note

No database data is sent to Microsoft, only operational data, billing and inventory data, diagnostics, and Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) data.

Cluster security

• Your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance can reside on hybrid or multicloud Kubernetes clusters. Review the security and governance considerations for your chosen cloud provider and Kubernetes distribution.
• Review the design considerations in the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes governance and security disciplines design area.

Network security

• Review the network connectivity critical design area for best practices and guidance.
• Decide on the connectivity mode to be used for your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance depending on your organization's security and compliance requirements.
• Depending on where your cluster is deployed, consider the network ports and endpoints needed for monitoring your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance using Grafana and Kibana.
• When creating the Data Controller, decide which service type you'll use between Kubernetes LoadBalancer or NodePort.

Identity and access management

• Review the identity and access management for Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance for best practices and guidance.
• While considering your organization's separation of duties and least-privileged access requirements, define cluster administration, operations, database administration, and developer roles within your organization. Mapping each team to actions and responsibilities determines Azure role-based access control (RBAC) roles or the Kubernetes ClusterRoleBinding and RoleBinding depending on the connectivity mode used.
• Consider using a responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed (RACI) parties matrix to support this effort. Build controls into the management scope hierarchy that you define based on resource consistency and inventory management guidance.
• Deploying the Azure Arc Data Controller requires some permissions that can be considered high privilege, such as creating a Kubernetes namespace or creating a cluster role. Understand the permissions needed to prevent excessive privileges.
• Decide on the authentication model to be used within your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance, whether it's Microsoft Entra authentication or SQL authentication. Review the identity and access management design area for design considerations and recommendations to choose the right authentication mode.
• Consider the differences between system-managed keytab and customer-managed keytab to deploy Azure Arc AD connector to support Microsoft Entra authentication in Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance. Both methods have the benefit of simplified operations compared to full customer control of managing service accounts and keytab for Microsoft Entra authentication support.

Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance security

• Decide on the connectivity mode, considering the trade-offs between having and not having direct connection to Azure, and how it can affect your hybrid and multicloud instances from using the current and future security capabilities enabled by Azure.
• Review the security capabilities that are available in Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance for your data workloads.
• Define the storage platform to be used for persistent volumes within your Kubernetes clusters and understand the security capabilities available to secure data residing on the persistent volumes. Review the storage disciplines critical design area while you design for your landing zone.
• Review the requirements and architecture of Transparent Data Encryption before enabling it on your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.
• Consider the different locations where you can store your Transparent Data Encryption credentials based on your organization's cryptographic key management policies and procedures.
• When deploying Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance in Indirectly Connected mode, decide on the certificate authority that will be used to provide the user-managed certificate according to your organization's security and compliance requirements.
• Deploying Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance in Directly Connected mode provides a system-managed certificate with auto-rotation capabilities. In Indirectly Connected mode, manual intervention is needed to rotate a user-managed certificate. Consider the manual operations and security requirements when choosing the connectivity mode to deploy.
• Consider the need for keeping your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance up-to-date with the latest versions, whether they're deployed in Directly or Indirectly Connected mode. Review the upgradeability disciplines critical design area for more guidance.

Monitoring strategy

• Review the management disciplines critical design area design and plan to collect metrics and logs from your hybrid resources into a Log Analytics workspace for further analysis, auditing, and alerting
• Understand the least privilege permissions required for the service principal to upload logs and metrics to Azure Monitor.

Design recommendations

Network security

• Secure your Grafana and Kibana monitoring dashboards with SSL/TLS certificates for transport layer security.
• Use Kubernetes LoadBalancer as your service type when deploying Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance for better availability.

Identity and access management

• Prefer the use of Microsoft Entra authentication to offload user lifecycle management to the directory services, and use security groups in Microsoft Entra ID to manage user permissions to access the SQL database.
• Use system-managed keytab mode for Microsoft Entra authentication support to offload domain account and keytab management overhead to simplify operations.
• If SQL authentication is used, adopt strong password policies and enable auditing to monitor SQL user identities and permissions granted to access database servers and databases.
• Dedicate a Kubernetes namespace for the Azure Arc Data Controller deployment and assign the least privilege permissions to deploy and manage.
• Create strong passwords for Grafana and Kibana dashboards and make sure to audit and rotate regularly.
• Monitor the activity log of your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance and Data Controllers to audit the different operations occurring on your hybrid resources. Create alerts for relevant events and integrate with security information and event management (SIEM) tools such as Microsoft Sentinel for security monitoring and incident response.

Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance security

• Whenever possible, choose Directly Connected mode over Indirectly Connected mode deployment of Azure Arc-enabled data services and Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance to make sure you're getting all the current and future security feature benefits associated with Directly Connected mode.
• Enable Transparent Data Encryption whenever possible to encrypt your data at rest.
• Store your Transparent Data Encryption credentials on persistent volumes for better resiliency.
• Use your storage platform capabilities to encrypt persistent volumes according to your organization's security and compliance requirements.
• Make sure to have your backup policy in place according to your requirements to recover from data loss. Review the business continuity and disaster recovery critical design area for more guidance.
• When deploying in Indirectly Connected mode, create a process to rotate the user-managed certificate.
• Make sure to have a process to keep your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance updated to the latest versions, independently of the connectivity mode.

Monitoring strategy

• Monitor the credential expiration or the change of the service principal used to upload metrics and logs to Azure.
• Create a process to rotate the service principal credentials according to your organization's security and compliance requirements.

Next steps

For more information on your hybrid and multicloud cloud journey, see the following articles:

• Review the capabilities of Azure Arc-enabled Data Services.
• Review the validated Kubernetes distributions for Azure Arc-enabled data services.
• Review Manage hybrid and multicloud environments.
• Learn more about operating Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance with least privilege.
• Experience Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance automated scenarios with Azure Arc Jumpstart.
• To learn more about Azure Arc, review the Azure Arc learning path on Microsoft Learn.