Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals

Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals

Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals

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## 0.1. Motivation
 
Security fosters situational awareness and maintains equilibrium. Without security, people become complacent and overlook unusual behavior by civilians, employees, and others around them. Security guides a positive and proactive culture because awareness is an ongoing activity and people want to do the right thing.

Choosing this exam is critical regardless of your primary interest in the cloud. You will require security despite of where you are and having that knowledge will help you advance. An introduction to security that will assist you in grasping some interesting cybersecurity concepts ranging from the fundamentals to some principles used when moving to the cloud such as the Zero Trust Model.

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## Table Of Contents

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# Foundation Concepts

## Security

**What is Security?** The goal of computer security is to protect a single machine and the data stored on it. Security is defined as being free from danger, attacks, or feeling safe.


It is essential to comprehend these terms because the following information will be derived from them.

### Encryption
Encryption is the process of converting information into a secret code that conceals the true meaning of the information. Cryptography is the science of encrypting and decrypting information. Unencrypted data is referred to as plaintext in computing, while encrypted data is referred to as ciphertext.

### Hashing
Hashing is the process of generating a value from a text or a list of numbers using a hash function, which is a mathematical function. A Hash Function is a function that transforms a numeric or alphanumeric key into a small practical integer value. In the hash table, the mapped integer value serves as an index.

### Shared Responsibility Model
The shared responsibility model, as mentioned in previous exams, identifies which security tasks are handled by the cloud provider and which security tasks are handled by you, the customer. The duties differ depending on where the workload is hosted:

- Software as a Service (SaaS) 
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) 
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 
- Datacenter on-premises

#### Datacenters located on-site
You are responsible for everything in an on-premises datacenter, from physical security to encrypting sensitive data.

#### Infrastructure as a Service 
IaaS is the cloud service that requires the most management from the cloud customer. You use the cloud provider's computing infrastructure when you use IaaS. The cloud customer is not responsible for the physical components of the datacenter, such as computers, networks, or physical security. The cloud customer is still responsible for software components such as operating systems, network controls, applications, and data security.

#### Platform as a Service
PaaS is a platform for developing, testing, and deploying software applications. The goal of PaaS is to allow you to quickly create an application without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider manages the hardware and operating systems in PaaS, while the customer is responsible for the applications and data.

#### Software as a Service
The cloud provider hosts and manages SaaS for the customer. It is typically licensed on a monthly or annual basis. SaaS software includes Microsoft 365, Skype, and Dynamics CRM Online. SaaS necessitates the least amount of management on the part of the cloud customer. Except for data, devices, accounts, and identities, the cloud provider is in charge of everything.

### Defense In Depth
Defense in depth is a security strategy that employs multiple security measures to safeguard an organization's assets. The theory is that if one line of defense is breached, additional layers of defense exist as a backup to ensure that threats are stopped along the way. Defense in depth addresses the security flaws that exist not only in hardware and software, but also in people, as negligence or human error are frequently the cause of a security breach.

Layers of security examples include:
- Physical security measures include restricting access to a datacenter to authorized personnel only.
- Control access to infrastructure and change control using identity and access security controls such as multifactor authentication or conditional access.
- Your corporate network's perimeter security includes distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection to filter large-scale attacks before they cause a denial of service for users.
- To limit communication between resources, network security measures such as network segmentation and network access controls are used.
- Compute layer security includes closing specific ports to secure access to virtual machines on-premises or in the cloud.
- Application layer security ensures that applications are secure and free of security flaws.
- Controls to manage access to business and customer data, as well as encryption to protect data, are all part of data layer security.

#### What about CIA 
All of the various mechanisms (technologies, processes, and training) are components of a cybersecurity strategy, the goals of which include ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

- Confidentiality: One of the fundamental concepts of cybersecurity is confidentiality. Simply put, confidentiality protects confidential information from unauthorized disclosure. Confidentiality is a shared responsibility for technologists and everyone else in the organization. As well as preserving authorized restrictions on access and disclosure, including means for protecting personal privacy and proprietary information.
- Integrity: The integrity of your system means that data or information in your system is not modified or deleted by unauthorized parties. This is a critical component of data hygiene, reliability, and accuracy. Its main objective is to make sure that a data will stay undamaged its all life cycle and will be the same where ever it can be not to cause any disturbance to information.
- Availability: refers to making data available to those who require it at the time they require it. It is critical for the organization to keep customer data secure, but it must also be accessible to employees who deal with customers. While it may be more secure to store data in encrypted form, employees must have access to unencrypted data.


### Zero Trust model
#### Overview
Zero Trust is a cybersecurity strategy that secures an organization by removing implicit trust and continuously validating every stage of a digital interaction. Zero Trust assumes that everything is on an open and untrusted network, including resources behind corporate firewalls. The Zero Trust model follows the tenet of "trust no one, verify everything."

#### Guiding Principles
- Verify explicitly: Always authenticate and authorize based on the data points available, such as user identity, location, device, service or workload, data classification, and anomalies.
- Least privileged access: To protect both data and productivity, limit user access with just-in-time and just-enough access (JIT/JEA), risk-based adaptive policies, and data protection.
- Assume breach: Access can be divided into network, user, device, and application segments. Encrypt data, and use analytics to gain visibility, detect threats, and improve security.

A security strategy that applies the three Zero Trust model principles across the six foundational pillars assists businesses in delivering and enforcing security across their organization.

#### Foundational pillars
1- Users, services, and devices can all have identities. When an identity attempts to access a resource, it must be verified using strong authentication and the principles of least privilege access.

2- As data flows from devices to on-premises workloads and the cloud, devices create a large attack surface. Devices that monitor health and compliance are an important aspect of security.

3- Data is consumed through applications. This includes identifying all applications in use, which is sometimes referred to as Shadow IT because not all applications are managed centrally. This pillar also includes permissions and access management.

4- Based on its attributes, data should be classified, labeled, and encrypted. Finally, security efforts are about protecting data and ensuring that it remains secure when it leaves devices, applications, infrastructure, and networks under the organization's control.

5- Infrastructure, whether on-premises or in the cloud, is a threat vector. You assess for version, configuration, and JIT access to improve security, and you use telemetry to detect attacks and anomalies. This enables you to automatically block or flag dangerous behavior and take protective measures.

6- Networks should be segmented, including in-network micro segmentation at a deeper level. Real-time threat protection, end-to-end encryption, monitoring, and analytics should also be used.




## Compliance
**What is Compliance? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, compliance is "the act of obeying an order, rule, or request." As per Wikipedia, "compliance" means "conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard, or law." 

Compliance is the state of being in accordance with established guidelines or specifications, or the process of becoming so.
Organizations can be held accountable for meeting dozens of regulations, ranging from personal and financial information to data protection and privacy, in order to be compliant. The following are some key concepts and terms related to data compliance.

#### Data residency
Data residency laws require companies doing business in a country to keep data about its citizens on servers in that country. Companies with customers or employees in multiple countries may find regulatory requirements onerous and difficult to meet.

#### Data sovereignty 
Data sovereignty entails maintaining control over encryption and data access. This prevents sensitive data from falling into the hands of a foreign entity without express permission, resulting in non-compliance with country-specific data sovereignty laws.

#### Data privacy
A privacy-compliant organization has strong administrative, technical, and physical security safeguards in place to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This includes the ability to detect and prevent unauthorized or inappropriate data access.


## Identity

**What's Identity?** who you are, the way you think about yourself, the way you are viewed by the world and the characteristics that define you. The same logic applies to determining your digital identity.

### Authentication VS Authorization
Authentication and authorization are two critical information security processes used by administrators to safeguard systems and data. Authentication verifies a user's or service's identity, while authorization (AuthZ) determines their access rights.

### Identity as the primary security perimeter

### Four pillars of an identity infrastructure
#### Administration
Administration is concerned with the creation and management/administration of identities for users, devices, and services. As an administrator, you control how and under what conditions identity characteristics can change (be created, updated, deleted).

#### Authentication
The authentication pillar describes how much an IT system needs to know about an identity in order to have sufficient proof that they are who they claim to be. It entails challenging a party for legitimate credentials.
Authorization.

#### The authorization 
This pillar is concerned with processing incoming identity data in order to determine the level of access that an authenticated person or service has within the application or service that it wishes to access.

#### Auditing
The auditing pillar is concerned with keeping track of who does what, when, where, and how. Auditing entails detailed reporting, alerts, and identity governance.

### the identity provider capabilties
#### The usage of Central Identity
Organizations can use a central identity provider to establish authentication and authorization policies, monitor user behavior, detect suspicious activity, and reduce malicious attacks.

#### Modern authentication
This is a catch-all term for methods of authentication and authorization between a client, such as your laptop or phone, and a server, such as a website or application. The identity provider's role is central to modern authentication. An identity provider creates, manages, and maintains identity data while also providing authentication, authorization, and auditing services.

#### Single sign-on
Support for single sign-on is another critical capability of an identity provider and "modern authentication" (SSO). SSO allows users to log in once and use that credential to access multiple applications or resources. Federation is the process of establishing SSO between multiple identity providers.

### Concept of directory services 
#### Active Directory
Active Directory (AD) is a database and set of services developed by Microsoft that connects users to the network resources they require to complete their tasks. The database (or directory) contains critical information about your environment, such as the number of users and computers present, as well as who is authorized to do what.

#### Azure Active Directory
The increased use of cloud services, SaaS applications, and personal devices at work has necessitated modern authentication and the evolution of Active Directory-based identity solutions.

The next generation of identity and access management solutions is Azure Active Directory. It offers organizations an Identity as a Service (IDaaS) solution for all of their cloud and on-premises apps. We'll concentrate on Azure AD, Microsoft's cloud-based identity provider, in this course.

### Concept of Federation
in general terms A federation is the act of joining states or other groups with the agreement that they will be governed by a single central authority. The United States is an example of a federation.
The term "federation" refers to "an association formed by the merger of several groups or parties." Federation is defined in the Liberty Alliance Project specifications to include both identity federation and provider federation.

In practice, federation occurs when a user logs in to a third-party site using their social media account, such as Twitter. Twitter is an identity provider in this scenario, and the third-party site may use a different identity provider, such as Azure AD. Azure AD and Twitter have a trust relationship.

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# Azure Active Directory Solutions
## Services and Identity
## Authentication 
## Access Management
## Identity Protection and Governance 

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# Microsoft Security Solutions
## Basic
## Security Management
## Microsoft Sentinel
## Thread Protection with Microsoft 365 Defender

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# Microsoft Compliance Solutions

## Service Trust Portal

## Microsoft Purview
### Compliance management
### Information Protection
### Insider Risk
### eDiscovery and Audit 

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# Governance 




> ❝Cloud computing is a challenge to security, but one that can be overcome.❞ -"Whitfield Diffie"

Microsoft Certified: Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals

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## Motivation
Having the ability to generate valuable insights from data, deploy rich applications, create powerful workflows, automation, and leverage AI with no/low code and through a simple drag-and-drop is worth examining.

Microsoft PowerPlatform stands to fulfil the criteria with its enrich capabilities. The preceding will give you additional information about what you can perform with it all pertaining to the PL-900 exam.



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# What is Microsoft PowerPlatform
Microsoft Power Platform is a powerful suite of 4 main products that allow you to automate processes, build solutions, analyze data, and create virtual agents.
All these products offer a platform in which no code is required to build the applications.


## Key Products
<img src="/images/PL900STUFF/products.png"
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### Power Apps
Power Apps are a great tool for anyone to learn and contribute quickly, regardless of their educational background or previous experience.
With Power Apps quickly build apps for mobile and web, from low-code to no-code. It also provides a way for non-developers to become familiar with the app creation process and create their own apps. Developers can also efficiently and productively conceive and build more complex solutions. Power Apps can connect to existing data from SharePoint, Excel, SQL, Common Data Service, and many other data sources. In addition, you can use these data sources to organize the various components of your Power App and create intuitive functionality.
### Power Automate
Power Automate is a cloud-based automation platform that allows users to build automated processes across different apps and services.
Power Automate (formerly known as Microsoft Flow) is a web-based tool designed to interface with a growing library of software from both Microsoft and other vendors.
With Power Automate, you can simplify your life and reduce the number of manual tasks you perform. Using Power automate you can manage the cloud data and te onpremises data.
### Power BI 
PowerBI is a business intelligence platform which enables business users to gather and display their data in easily interpretable charts and graphs. 
Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on premises hybrid data warehouses
### Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents is a tool to build powerful chatbots without the need to write code, and that allows you to automate communication with potential clients or employees. The goal is to easily create and maintain virtual agents without programming, using a guided graphical interface without the need for data analysts or developers.

## Components
<img src="/images/PL900STUFF/components.png"
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### Connectors
#### Data Source types:
- Tabular data source: It is one that returns data in a structured table format.
- Function-based data: A function-based data source is one that uses functions to interact with the data source.

**Connectors** are the bridges from your data source to your app, workflow, or dashboard. Microsoft Power Platform has more than 600 connectors available to common data sources.
Examples of popular connectors include Salesforce, Office 365, Twitter, Dropbox, Google services, and more.
### Microsoft Dataverse
A Dataverse is essentially an online database or data warehouse that pulls in and stores data from multiple sources. This data can then be accessed or pushed into other applications for analysis and further use. Microsoft Dataverse is the common currency that enables the components of Microsoft Power Platform to work together. It is the foundation that enables the consolidation, display, and manipulation of data.
### AI Builder
Microsoft AI Builder is a Power Platform capability to speed up processes, predict outcomes and improve performance through AI insights. 
With AI Builder, you do not need coding or data science skills to access the power of AI. You can build custom models tailored to your needs, or choose a prebuilt model that is ready to use for many common business scenarios.

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# Dataverse
<img src="/images/PL900STUFF/metaverse.png"
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Dataverse is intended to serve as your central data repository for business data, and you may already be using it. It is the backbone of many Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions, including Field Service, Marketing, Customer Service, and Sales. It is also included as part of Power Apps and Power Automate, with native connectivity. Dataverse is also used by Microsoft Power Platform AI Builder and Portals features.

## Features

#### Security
Dataverse uses Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for authentication, allowing for restricted access and multi-factor authentication. It allows row and column-level authorisation and has extensive auditing capabilities.
#### Logic
Dataverse makes it simple to implement business logic at the data level. The same rules apply regardless of how a user interacts with the data. These rules could be about duplicate detection, business rules, workflows, or something else entirely.
#### Data
Dataverse empowers you to shape your data by enabling you to discover, model, validate, and report on it. This control ensures that your data looks the way you want it to, no matter how it is utilized.
#### Storage
Your physical data is stored on the Azure cloud via Dataverse. This cloud-based storage relieves you of the stress about where your data is stored and how it scales. All of these issues are taken care of for you.
#### Integration
Dataverse links in a variety of ways to help you meet your business goals. You can pull data in and out through APIs, webhooks, eventing, and data exports.

## Microsoft Dataverse
you can establish one or more cloud-based instances of a standardized database, With Microsoft Dataverse. Predefined tables and columns in the database store data that is common to almost all organizations and businesses. By adding new columns or tables, you can personalize and extend what is saved.

You can access your data saved in Microsoft Dataverse in a variety of ways. With technologies like Power Apps or Power Automate, you can work directly with the data. You can also connect to Microsoft Dataverse from any business solution using connectors and APIs.

## Dataverse Database
A Dataverse database is a single instance of Microsoft Dataverse that stores data in tables, which are a collection of standard and custom data structures. **A table** is a logical collection of rows for storing data. Many columns are used to manage distinct pieces of information about a single row in a table's rows.

To host data underlying your business solutions, you can build one or more database instances in Microsoft Dataverse. Each Microsoft Dataverse database starts with the same set of tables to hold data, but you can always extend and alter it to match your individual business requirements. This means you can share business solutions that use Microsoft Dataverse standard tables across your organization.

Large data collections and complicated data models are supported by the Dataverse database. Tables can hold millions of entries, and each instance of a Microsoft Dataverse database can be expanded to four terabytes of storage.

## Common Data Model 
The Common Data Model is a logical design that includes a set of open-sourced, standardized, extensible data tables and relationships published by Microsoft and its partners as part of the Open Data Initiative. The Common Data Model is built on a set of predefined tables, columns, semantic metadata, and relationships.

**The standard table design in a Microsoft Dataverse database is based upon an open data model standard: Common Data Model.**

You will be able to benefit from a rich ecosystem of solutions built by vendors using the Common Data Model. There is virtually no limit to how far a Microsoft Dataverse database can be extended.


## Table Types
A table is a logical structure containing rows and columns that represents a set of data.
- **Standard:** Standard tables in Dataverse include account, business unit, contact, task, and user tables. The majority of Dataverse's standard tables can be changed.
- **Managed:** Tables that have been imported into the environment as part of a managed solution and are not editable.
- **Custom:** Custom tables are unmanaged tables that are either imported from another system or generated from scratch in the Dataverse environment. 


## Columns
Within a row of a table, columns are a technique to store a single piece of data. You may think of them as an Excel column. Data types are assigned to columns, which means you can store data of a specific kind in a column that matches that data type.


## Relationships
You may develop an effective solution that can scale while retaining high performance by creating a table for each item and associating them to one another. You won't have to store repetitious data or support enormous rows with vast quantities of blank data if you split the data into multiple tables. Splitting the data into distinct tables will also make reporting much easier.
### Relationships between Tables
A relational connection exists between tables that are related to one another. Relationships between tables can take many forms, but the two most common are one-to-many and many-to-many, both of which Microsoft Dataverse supports.

Splitting data into different tables allows for a more effective and scalable solution design, but figuring out how to do so can be tricky. Fortunately, Microsoft Dataverse already has many of the tables that most businesses will want. Using standard tables and extending them will ensure that you are creating solutions around a tried-and-true, scalable method of storing data.

## Environments
In Microsoft Power Platform, environments are used to store, manage, and communicate your organization's business data, apps, and flows. You can supply one Microsoft Dataverse database per environment for use inside that environment. You may control user access, security settings, and the storage associated with a database in a Microsoft Dataverse system.

Setting up one environment for development, another for testing, and yet another for production use allows you to manage solution development and data storage across many environments. You can also create an atmosphere based on a certain region. You could, for example, create separate environments for Europe and Asia. Microsoft Dataverse will be installed in zero or one of these settings.

## Business rules
Business rules can be defined in Microsoft Dataverse. Business rules let you implement and retain business logic at the data layer rather than the application layer. Simply put, business rules you design in Microsoft Dataverse take effect regardless of where you interact with the data.

## Microsoft Power Platform admin center
You can utilize Microsoft Dataverse's administration tools to create new database instances or customize the access and functionality available to users of each Dataverse database instance.

The Microsoft Power Platform admin center has the majority of the administration settings you'll need. When trying to administer Microsoft Dataverse, the first thing you should do is look for administration settings.

To access the Admin Center, go to PowerApps and select Admin Center by clicking on the settings icon.

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# Power Apps


## Canvas App

## Model-Driven App

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# Power Automate
## Overview

## Automated Solution

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# Power BI
## Overview

## Build A Dashboard

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# Power Virtual Agents
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