Halloween is over but the the world is still a scary place. In a continuation of a thought from an article I wrote a few weeks back for Auditing AzureSQL Firewall Policies, I thought I would also include a short function for auditing azure storage accounts that are currently configured for “public” access.
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I periodically review Azure PaaS resource edge security. As a part of that process I examine and cleanup AzureSQL firewall rules. Once you have more than a handful of subscriptions and AzureSQL databases, doing this manually starts becoming unfeasible. To that end, Azure Powershell is your friend…
As is typical, you need to install the Powershell AZ module on your workstation, after that you need to run.
Connect-AzAccount
Then supply your Azure credentials (preferably creds that have the ability to view and manage all of your AzureSQL databases and firewall rules, otherwise the rest is moot.
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When your business hinges upon remote workers and remote offices, secure connections, and lots of data manipulation… how do you deal with some of your folks being extra remote? Granted the internet in 2020 is very different from the internet in say 2008 and the world has grown ever smaller as a result… but distance and all of the congested, intervening, network hops that come with it are still a reality. Particularly for remote workers living on other continents that have to interface regularly with systems in the United States as a part of their job.
The two big headaches for remote workers in other countries connecting to offices in the US are latency and bandwidth. In the past there were only and handful of solutions, most involving long-term contracts with a telcom and lengthy, complicated setups. I would argue that MPLS still falls squarely in this camp. SD-WAN has certainly improved on all of the above but it’s still enough of a headache that it typically involves contract terms and conversations with sales “engineers.”
I would like to propose something different using Azure.
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The current state of the world has caused some unique stresses on IT infrastructure. For IT departments servicing internal teams, remote access infrastructure in particular has felt the brunt of the blow. To that end, I spent a couple of weeks testing out enterprise VPN solutions.
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I work on Azure Tenants that utilize multiple subscriptions in their design. I wanted to centralize my Azure Automation work and use a single Automation account. By default, I found that powershell scripts I fired off from Azure Automation work within the subscription that the Automation account was created within. But business requirements necessitate multiple subscriptions and MY requirements necessitate using a single Automation Account to simplify my life (and the lives of everyone else that I work with). A running joke is that, when it comes to IT, well-intention’d laziness is a virtue… We rebrand laziness as “simplicity,” “automation,” and/or “efficiency,” depending on the context of the conversation of course. I often say somewhat tongue-n-cheek that “you don’t want your IT department to be “busy” all the time.” An all-the-time overly busy IT department typically means that something was poorly planned and/or your network is being held together with spit and frayed ethernet cable. Anyhow, I digress…
With that groundwork laid, the goal is a Powershell automation script that can essentially “hop” subscriptions as needed. I also value modularity. Goodness knows that in the pursuit of laziness we should never do the same work twice except in the most extreme or dire circumstances. To that end, I wrote a simple function I could just drop into any script along with an additional parameter and now said script can be used across subscriptions…
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