Managed identities is a feature that provides Azure services with an automatically managed identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). You can use this feature in Azure Cognitive Search to create a data source object with a connection string that does not include any credentials. Instead, your search service will be granted access to the data source through role-based access control (RBAC).
Azure resources such as storage accounts that are used as data sources, can be configured such that they can only be accessed from a specific list of virtual networks. They can also be configured to disallow any "public network" access. Customers can now request Azure Cognitive Search to create an outbound private endpoint connection in order to securely access data from such data sources via indexers.
Learn about accessing secure resources via private endpoints.
Learn how to set up an indexer connection to a data source using a managed identity.