Astro, an orchestration platform powered by Airflow, provides a variety of security and authentication options to ensure secure network connectivity and data service interaction. Administrators new to Astro are advised to prioritize these issues from the start, particularly if they come from using open-source Airflow, which might have fostered less secure practices. For secure connectivity, Astro provides options such as using public or private endpoints, with private endpoints offering enhanced security and potentially lower costs, depending on the cloud provider. Manual network connections can be facilitated through VPC or VNet peering, with the option to connect to transit networks for more complex setups. Authentication and authorization are equally crucial, with Astro offering several methods to manage credentials, including storing secrets in Astro or Airflow, using an external secrets manager, or leveraging cloud-native identity and access management systems like AWS IAM roles or GCP Workload Identity. Astro continues to evolve, adding new connectivity and authorization features, and provides comprehensive documentation to guide users in setting up secure and efficient infrastructures.