Deepdive Governance and Azure Policy

Getting cloud Governance right becomes even more critical when hosting your application on a cloud platform. Your customers demand a secure, compliant en efficient environment for their data and applications. So you want to implement Azure policies as soon as possible and manage governance from the start of your cloud journey.

[Free Governance Workshop] 

What is Cloud Governance?
Good Cloud governance results in guardrails that keep the company on a safe path throughout that  journey. Governance provides mechanisms and processes to maintain control over your applications and resources in Azure. As your cloud workloads change over time, so do cloud governance processes and policies.

Governance in Microsoft Azure is primarily implemented using several services;

• Azure Policy allows you to create, assign, and manage policy definitions to enforce rules for your resources. Azure Policies keeps those resources in compliance with your corporate standards.
• Role Based Access Control Control who can access specific features, resources or implement new technologies.
• Tenant and subscription management Deciding on the amount of tenants and subscriptions is something you want to get right from the start. Architecting the right structure for your tenants and subscriptions is a foundation of good governance.
• Resource Tagging Organizing resources for cost management, technical management or just to create an overview. Without organising your resources things can become complicated.
• Azure Cost Management allows you to track cloud usage and expenditures for your Azure resources and other cloud providers. Please visit our eventpage “Cost Management on Azure” if you want to dig deeper on this subject (Microsoft, 2019)

What are the benefits of using Governance for Microsoft Azure?
Why should you implement governance on Azure?

• Security & compliance
  Customers will demand some form of compliance, trust and security. And if you want to scale your business, you want that too. Through governance, resources can be congifured consistently to manage security and compliance risks. You don't have to worry about not meeting your companies requlatory requirements, because if you implement

• Consistency
  In Azure you can choose to deploy a wide variety of technologies, scale your resources as big as you want anddeploy them in whichever region you want. The fact that you have those capabilities does not mean you have to provide everyone with the ability to use all of them. In fact, you want to focus on specific technologies and make sure your team deploys them the way that you and your customers expect them to be deployed. Think about sizing, location and role based access control(welseyhaakman.org).

• Controlling your costs
  Implementing the correct guard rails will make your costs predictable

• Transparency
  Controlling who has access to what, what’s running where and who is using it also gives you the possibility to be transparent to your customers. Show them you’re in control

• Adopt new technologies faster
  Implementing “rules” might sound counter productive in terms of innovation but the opposite is true. Having the right processes and guard rails in place will help you give the “green light” for new technologies much faster. Studies have proven that good governance complements innovation.

Who is this workshop for?
Whether you are planning to migrate to Azure or you already have workloads hosted on Azure, this workshop will guide you through the basic principles of getting your environment consistent, compliant and secure. In a 1,5 hours deepdive you will gain the knowledge to set up your governance on Microsoft Azure.

What can you expect during the workshop?

• Introduction to Governance
• Azure Policy
• Managing environments with Azure Lighthouse
• Delegated Resource Management
• ..... Demo’s