Tips from the Field

If you are responsible for managing and maintaining your company’s cloud computing environment, such as Microsoft Azure, ensuring that the cloud environment is secure and available and performing optimally to make the most of its cloud computing resources is vital. Therefore, adopting best practices for implementing and managing an Azure cloud environment is essential.

In the following sections, we will share a few of the best practices and tips from the field we’ve learned along our journey to ensure your environment is secure, compliant, and scalable, while also reducing costs and minimizing the risk of outages and security breaches. Furthermore, the following best practices will help you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in the Azure cloud, ensuring that your environment remains efficient and effective over time.

Adopting Azure cloud best practices is vital for the health and security of your organization’s cloud...

Azure governance

Imagine that the SpringToys IT team was tasked with implementing Azure governance. They were assigned to ensure that all the resources and data stored in Azure were protected and managed efficiently. The IT team was excited but intimidated by the task’s magnitude.

We reviewed Azure governance as a crucial aspect of working in a cloud environment as it helps ensure that the environment is secure and compliant. Governance will also enforce standardization so that resources and processes are consistent across the company. This can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and minimize the risk of errors and inconsistencies.

In companies with limited resources, forming a cloud core team that includes at least one expert in Azure governance is highly recommended. This dedicated expert can actively listen to the IT team’s concerns and provide invaluable guidance on implementing Azure governance best practices.

Determining where to begin establishing a governance...

Azure monitoring

When hosting workloads in the cloud, establishing clear ownership and accountability for your monitoring environment is of utmost importance. Consider creating a dedicated team in your organization responsible for managing and maintaining your monitoring solution and ensuring they have the necessary skills and resources to perform their duties effectively.

Establishing clear communication channels between the monitoring team and other stakeholders in your organization, such as developers and operations teams, is essential to ensure everyone knows the monitoring goals and objectives and can work together to achieve them.

Planning and designing your Azure Monitor environment is crucial for your cloud strategy. The monitoring goals and objectives should be clearly defined, and you should identify the data types you need to collect to achieve those goals. It’s also important to consider your monitoring solution’s performance and availability requirements...

Identity management and protection

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a powerful feature in Azure AD that allows administrators to assign different levels of access to other users or groups based on their roles within the organization. Using features such as RBAC and multi-factor authentication (MFA), SpringToys can ensure that access to sensitive resources is granted only to authorized users, helping reduce the risk of security incidents, and complying with relevant regulations and standards.

Regularly reviewing and revoking access to resources is another critical best practice for managing access using Azure AD. This way, SpringToys can ensure that users have only the access they need and that security policies are being enforced effectively.

Remember that Azure AD and Microsoft Sentinel work together to provide a comprehensive security solution for organizations using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

By integrating Azure AD with Microsoft Sentinel, SpringToys can leverage...

Azure networking

Ensure that Azure networking services are configured to meet the organization’s security, performance, and compliance requirements. Regularly reviewing and updating the configurations and policies of Azure networking services is also essential to ensure that they are aligned with the changing needs of the organization and the evolving security landscape.

It is crucial to emphasize that shared networking resources such as ExpressRoute circuits and VPN gateways should only be accessible to a restricted group of privileged users – specifically, network administrators.

Azure networking services are one of the core aspects when working with containerized applications. Both are essential components of a cloud environment, and they work together to ensure the reliability, scalability, and security of an organization’s cloud environment.

Network security is crucial to securing any cloud deployment, including those in Azure. Azure provides many...

Azure containers

Azure containers provide a flexible and cost-effective way to deploy and manage applications in the cloud. They must be configured and managed to support the organization’s needs.

You can use Azure Container Registry to store and manage container images, leverage Azure Kubernetes Service to manage and orchestrate containers, and utilize Azure Security Center to monitor and protect containers from security threats.

When using Azure Container Instances, it is essential to note that they are stateless by default. Any state stored within the container will be lost if it is restarted, crashes, or stops. Therefore, to maintain a state beyond the container’s lifetime, it is recommended to mount a volume from an external store.

One option for achieving this is to mount an Azure file share created with Azure Files, as it provides fully managed file shares hosted in Azure Storage that can be accessed via the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. By using...

Summary

This chapter summarized the top best practices you could implement in your organization. It started with the importance of Azure governance in ensuring a secure, compliant, and efficient cloud environment. It highlighted the need for a clear organizational hierarchy, defining organizational roles and responsibilities, and using Azure initiatives and policies to manage and govern Azure resources. We suggested leveraging Azure landing zones with the Bicep language and Azure Blueprints and continuously monitoring and auditing the Azure environment. We recommended using tools such as the Cloud Adoption Framework Governance Benchmark Tool and IaC for Azure, such as ARM templates or the Bicep language, to automate the deployment of resources and ensure compliance with Azure governance policies.

We also highlighted the importance of creating a dedicated team to manage and maintain Azure’s monitoring solution. We emphasized the significance of clear communication channels...