The classic monolithic User entity—stuffed with birth dates, phone numbers, employment history, and marital
status “just in case”—turns into a compliance nightmare the moment someone requests data deletion. You can’t
delete without breaking referential integrity. You can’t keep the data without violating GDPR. You can’t
anonymize without retaining fields that should never have existed. The solution isn’t complex: separate
operational data from personal data, make consent-based fields nullable and purpose-documented, implement
soft deletes with query filters, and validate your API boundaries with integration tests that fail when
unnecessary fields leak through. Data minimization isn’t regulatory overhead—it’s architectural hygiene
that makes your deletion logic straightforward and your audit responses honest.
Every developer who has tried simple encryption with XOR and hardcoded keys eventually faces the audit that exposes their house of cards.
I’ve watched production systems fail compliance assessments because someone believed base64 encoding was good enough or that compilation obscures secrets.
The .NET Data Protection API exists precisely because Microsoft’s cryptography team spent years solving problems most developers don’t know they have.
This isn’t about learning yet another library—it’s about understanding why professional implementations outperform clever hacks, and how Azure Key Vault integration transforms theoretical security into auditable compliance.
Stateful workloads in Kubernetes require understanding PersistentVolume architecture, Azure storage trade-offs, and backup strategies. This article covers PVC/PV patterns, Azure Disk vs Files performance profiles, Velero backup configurations, and multi-cluster replication patterns based on production experience.
Hardcoded secrets aren’t just bad practice—they’re ISO 27017 violations with real consequences: failed audits, denied insurance claims, contractual penalties. That connection string in your appsettings.Production.json? It represents a compliance gap your organization probably doesn’t even know exists. Azure Key Vault with Managed Identity isn’t an optional security enhancement—it’s the minimum viable implementation of standards you already claim to follow.
Your audit logs probably won’t survive a real security incident. Most implementations log too much, protect too little, and provide zero value when something breaks at 2 AM. Here’s how to fix that with structured logging that actually works.
