Creating a Credential Object  is useful when you require to pass a username and password through Powershell commands.

You might see Credential used in various Powershell cmdlets - such as SqlVulnerabilityAssessmentScan. An example of invoking the SqlVulnerabilityAssessmentScan may be something like:

Invoke-SqlVulnerabilityAssessmentScan -Credential "sa" -ServerInstance myserver\inst1 -DatabaseName "master"

The problem with the way Credential is used above - will create a request for the password. What might be more efficient is to create a secure object with username \ password

Enter the PSCredential. A PSCredential object represents a set of security credentials, i.e username and password.

Here is an example of applying creating a PSCredential object and applying to when using the Powershell cmdlet .

In this example - i've hardcoded the password but in a real scenario you'd store this in some sort of encrypted vault. 

$un="myusername"
$pw="mypassword"   
[System.Security.SecureString]$SecPwd = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $pw -AsPlainText -Force
$Cred = new-object -typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist @($un,$SecPwd)

Invoke-SqlVulnerabilityAssessmentScan -Credential $Cred -ServerInstance myserver\inst1 -DatabaseName "master"

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