I live in Texas. For the past few days, we’ve been getting storms — some violent — at around 3 AM. If the storms are bad enough, I’ll have a headache all day — and I don’t mean from the barometric pressure.

My client is using K2 Cloud, and their SQL databases are in Azure. The process of connecting to my client’s databases includes passage through their firewall, which is secured in part by IP address. I work from home, as are many during this pandemic, so the IP address they’ll need is my public IP address, issued by my Internet provider.

With storms like these, a drop in power will mean losing the lease on my public IP address. If my Internet provider issues me a new address, I won’t be able to log into my client’s Azure RDBMS. I shall have to send my new public IP address to the client’s Azure administrator, so he can make a new firewall rule to allow my requests. That administrator is busy, so changes like these can mean hours or days of waiting… that’s the headache part.

If you find yourself in this position, or are logging into an Azure SQL RDBMS for the first time, here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Get the e-mail address of the Azure SQL administrator, because you’ll need to send a note with your IP address asking for access.

2. Find your public IP address. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to Google “What is my IP address” — Google will return your current public IP address. If you’re already trying to access the databases through SSMS, a form titled “New Firewall Rule” may pop up that shows your current public IP address, grayed out in the bottom half of the form.

3. Send an email either to the Azure admin directly, or through your chain and cc: to the Azure admin, requesting the firewall change. Be sure to include your new public IP address in the message. Bonus points if you know what your old address was; the admin may be able to edit the existing rule instead of adding one — or at least she’ll know which old rule to delete.