How does Azure protect me from SQLi and malicious insiders?

Question

Im writing a thesis on cloud security and I was wondering if someone with knowledge could tell me how Azure protects my application from SQLi. And also how they reduce the risk of Malicious insiders, not only by policy but also by technical implementations.

Answer 1

As I understand it, Azure doesn't provide any additional protections against things like SQL Injection than you'd have if you hosted the SQL server yourself.
SQL Injection relates more to the code being run in conjunction with the database, either through the code you write in your stored procedures, or the code written in your application which then calls SQL for it's data. Protecting against SQL Injection is
done at this level, not at the base SQL level, so Azure doesn't make a difference.
Things like not sanitising the information inputted to your application puts you at risk, eg ensuring that when someone enters their name on a website form that it really is just a name (so no special characters, no single quotes etc) before passing that
information to SQL.
In terms of malicious insiders, well Azure does provide protection in terms of firewall restrictions etc, but that's realistically no different to if you had your own SQL server sitting in front of a firewall. In the same way as you would with your own dedicated
SQL server, if you grant users permission to access the database then there's no way to prevent them from doing what they want.