AST is an automated security configuration checker tool for the MS SQL 2016 Database platform which produces a security audit report in HTML after being run. With AST being automated and consistent, audits are more streamlined and standardised
reducing the time taken to perform audits as well as the number of errors made during each audit which is crucial in the auditing field. As AST is coded in PowerShell with no third-party dependencies, it is flexible and can be run
in any environment. AST also features a user-friendly GUI interface that allows auditors to easily customise the security checking conditions of the script, without any prior knowledge of programming, to account for any desired changes
in the client’s requirements making it intuitive and versatile. AST is a framework that can be used to audit newer and older MSSQL server versions. AST uses the newest version of PowerShell and is backwards compatible with PowerShell
versions up to version 3. This allows AST to be run on MS SQL servers with older versions of operating systems such as Windows Server 2012 (PowerShell version 3.0) or Windows Server 2012 R2 (PowerShell version 4.0).