Governance in Azure – Components and Services

Cloud computing governance refers to the policies, procedures, and standards organizations use to manage cloud services. This includes ensuring compliance with regulations, managing security and risk, and ensuring the proper use of resources.

Effective cloud governance also involves continuous monitoring and reporting to track usage, costs, and performance. Put simply, a clear and well-defined cloud governance strategy is key to effectively managing the use of cloud services in an organization.

In this chapter, we will analyze how a comprehensive cloud governance strategy can help organizations effectively manage their cloud services, while ensuring compliance with regulations, security, and risk and getting the most value from their investment.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following main topics:

• Azure governance
• Azure governance – components and services
• Microsoft cost management

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Planning a comprehensive cloud governance strategy

What does it mean for you to adopt a comprehensive cloud governance strategy? How can we measure the impact of adopting a cloud governance strategy in an organization? Let’s start with an example of an ideal approach by seeing how SpringToys adopted a comprehensive cloud governance strategy.

Let’s imagine SpringToys has a team of IT professionals responsible for managing the company’s use of cloud services. The company has established policies and procedures to follow when using cloud services. These policies cover areas such as security, compliance, and resource management.

SpringToys has also implemented a system for monitoring and reporting the use of cloud services. This includes tracking usage and costs, as well as monitoring the performance of the services. This information is used to identify areas where the company can improve its use of cloud services and ensure that it gets the most value from its...

Understanding Azure governance

Azure governance is a way to ensure that an organization’s use of the Azure cloud platform is secure, compliant, and efficient. Think of Azure governance as a series of guidelines to help organizations keep track of their Azure subscriptions, resources, and policies, ensuring that only authorized users have access to specific resources and that compliance and security requirements are met.

Managing and controlling cloud resources is a continuous process. Cloud governance should work in conjunction with policies that organizations already have for procedures to govern their on-premises IT environment. The level of integration between on-premises and cloud policies varies, depending on an organization’s level of cloud governance maturity and the digital assets they have in the cloud. As the organization’s cloud environment evolves, so must its cloud governance processes and policies to adapt to changes.

To establish a solid foundation...

Azure governance – components and services

Azure governance refers to the set of practices, policies, and technologies that organizations use to manage their Azure resources and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. It includes several components and services that provide centralized management, control, and monitoring of Azure resources. The key components of Azure Governance include Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, Azure management groups, and Azure Resource Manager. Let’s understand each of these components.

Management groups

Let's imagine SpringToys has multiple departments, each with its own Azure subscription. In this case, SpringToys’ IT Team can leverage Azure management groups to manage and organize various subscriptions in a hierarchical structure, providing centralized control over access, policies, and compliance.

Every Azure AD tenant is allocated a sole top-level management group known as the root management group. This group...

Microsoft Cost Management

Let’s consider that SpringToys uses various Azure resources such as virtual machines to host its web servers, databases, and other applications. In addition to keeping track of those resources, the company has multiple business units such as marketing, IT, and operations that use Azure services. Each department has its own budget allocation and continuously manually adjusts its usage to reduce costs.

Using Microsoft Cost Management, SpringToys can monitor the cost of Azure resources and keep track of the spending of each business unit, ensuring each stays within its budget. Moreover, Microsoft Cost Management can be utilized to analyze Azure spending patterns over time to identify areas where an organization can optimize its usage and reduce costs.

Microsoft Cost Management components

Microsoft Cost Management comprises a suite of components to monitor, allocate, and optimize the cost of your cloud workloads:

• Cost Management: This is...

Summary

As discussed in this chapter, Azure governance is a crucial aspect of managing cloud infrastructure and is essential for organizations to ensure effective management of their cloud infrastructure, meet compliance requirements, enhance security, optimize costs, scale their infrastructure with ease, and maintain consistency in their infrastructure.

We reviewed the core components of Azure governance, including management groups, policies, blueprints, Resource Graph, and Cost Management. We learned that a well-defined cloud governance strategy involves continuous improvements over time.

In the field, it is strongly recommended that organizations establish a governance team responsible for overseeing cloud services. This team can be made up of IT professionals and business leaders, who can meet regularly to review an organization’s cloud governance strategy to ensure that it is aligned with the organization’s goals and objectives.

In the next chapter, we...