Another important security feature of Azure SQL is that it can be integrated with Azure Active Directory (AD) for authentication purposes. Without integrating with Azure AD, the only authentication mechanism available to SQL Server is via username and password authentication; that is, SQL authentication. It is not possible to use integrated Windows authentication. The connection string for SQL authentication consists of both the username and password in plaintext, which is not secure. Integrating with Azure AD, enabled authenticating application with Windows authentication, service principal name or token based. It is a good practice to used Azure SQL integrated with Azure AD.
There are other security features such as advanced threat protection, auditing of the environment, and monitoring that should be enabled on any enterprise-level Azure SQL deployments:
