Working with security principals

Security principals are used primarily for two scenarios: system access and identity integration.

System access is the ability for one system to access another and is closer to traditional methods for providing application or service access to other systems. A typical example is a database-specific username and password that an application would use to access the backend database.

One of the use cases for secret management in Key Vault is storing a database connection string containing the database username and password as a secret in the vault. However, we must first authenticate to the key vault for our application to access it, which can be performed using a username and password for the vault.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but in reality, this process helps protect our data. Security Principals in Azure can only be used programmatically; that is, you cannot use the credentials directly. It also allows one set of credentials to access multiple...