Security best practices

Best practices concerning the various authentication methods implemented by Service Connectors.

Service Connector Types, especially those targeted at cloud providers, offer a plethora of authentication methods matching those supported by remote cloud platforms. While there is no single authentication standard that unifies this process, there are some patterns that are easily identifiable and can be used as guidelines when deciding which authentication method to use to configure a Service Connector.

This section explores some of those patterns and gives some advice regarding which authentication methods are best suited for your needs.

This section may require some general knowledge about authentication and authorization to be properly understood. We tried to keep it simple and limit ourselves to talking about high-level concepts, but some areas may get a bit too technical.

Username and password

The key takeaway is this: you should avoid using your primary account password as authentication credentials as much as possible. If there are alternative authentication methods that you can use or other types of credentials (e.g. session tokens, API keys, API tokens), you should always try to use those instead.

Ultimately, if you have no choice, be cognizant of the third parties you share your passwords with. If possible, they should never leave the premises of your local host or development environment.

This is the typical authentication method that uses a username or account name plus the associated password. While this is the de facto method used to log in with web consoles and local CLIs, this is the least secure of all authentication methods and never something you want to share with other members of your team or organization or use to authenticate automated workloads.