What is the best practice for handling permissions for an Azure hosted (coded) process that calls into SharePoint Online?

Question

I have written a c# module (console) which queries and updates information in a SharePoint site. Currently, running from my desktop it uses hard-coded credentials with permissions for the relevant site collection. When I move this to production, I want to host the app in Azure.

Note: there is no front-end, it is merely a process which will run on a schedule and consequently there is no logged in user.

This must be a common requirement but I can find no definitive answer to how I should tackle this.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Answer 1

Best practice is to use Azure Key vault. Here's a tutorial. It assumes a .NET Core web app but the process would be similar for a console app.

As for deployment to Azure, you can take your console app and deploy it as an Azure WebJob and run it on a schedule via cron expression. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/webjobs-create