What is Azure management and governance?
Governance in Azure is primarily implemented with two services. Azure Policy allows you to create, assign, and manage policy definitions to enforce rules for your resources. This feature keeps those resources in compliance with your corporate standards.
What governance features does Azure provide?
- Create hierarchies.
- Apply policies.
- Add policies and roles to templates.
- Do inventory management.
- Optimise costs.
What is Azure management?
Azure Management is a framework that defines how users launch and maintain services in the Azure cloud. Azure Management cycle covers all Azure internal tools, Azure CSPs, and other cloud providers linked to Azure infrastructure.
What are Azure 4 management scopes?
In Azure, you can specify a scope at four levels: management group, subscription, resource group, and resource. Scopes are structured in a parent-child relationship. Each level of hierarchy makes the scope more specific. You can assign roles at any of these levels of scope.
What are two Azure management tools?
In addition to the graphical user interface offered at the Azure Portal, we have the ability to manage and interact with Azure via Azure Powershell, Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), Azure Cloud Shell, and the Azure Mobile Application available on iOS and Android platforms.
What is cloud governance in Azure?
It is based on a combination of identity, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), policies, and management groups. According to the Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide, “Azure governance is defined as the processes and mechanisms that are used to maintain control of your applications and resources
Subscription Management
Your use of Azure is subscription-based. Essentially, this is an agreement with Microsoft that you can use the Cloud platforms and services. If you purchase a SaaS service from Microsoft, you pay per user license. If you purchase PaaS or IaaS services, you pay according to your use of resources.
If you don’t want everyone in the organization to have access to all the data, you need to define the user access rules. Role Based Access Control (RBAC) allows you to manage which roles have access to which Azure resources, and what they can do with which resources.
Cost Management
As an organization, you want to be in control of costs. That’s why it’s useful to determine the sources of your Cloud spend in advance, so that you can allocate resources and budgets to business units, products, and roles within your organization.
You can then link warnings or automatic triggers to these budgets to prevent them from being exceeded. You can also easily manage your costs and budget in Azure Cost Management.
As a CSP Direct partner, we offer our customers a useful, free cost management tool that helps gain insight into costs. You can use this tool free of charge if you purchase Cloud services via CSP Direct.
Security
Security is one of the most important parts of your Governance plan. You don’t want everyone to have access to your data, and you want to make that clear to your customers. With Azure Policy, you can create and set out your Azure policy. The security rules resulting from this policy are automatically implemented in your environment. New and existing resources are audited for this.
By enforcing these policies, you ensure that your organization complies at all times with your company’s standards and service level agreements.
Resource Consistency
Resource Consistency focuses on ways to establish policy for the operational management of your environment or application. It ensures that your resources are configured consistently, so that they are discoverable by IT Operations. Azure Resource Manager — an implementation and management service for your resources — enables you to achieve consistency in your resources.
Identity Baseline
Identity Baseline complements your security policy. Nowadays, network security is increasingly focused on identity. In the Identity Baseline, you define authentication and authorization requirements by using Azure Active Directory.
Deployment Acceleration
The final step is to define deployment, configuration alignment, and script reusability in your Governance plan. This leads to “Deployment Acceleration,” speeding up the process. The above-mentioned tools have capabilities that will help you achieve Deployment Acceleration.
Azure Blueprints
In Azure Blueprints, you can quickly and easily create a blueprint that defines your policy. The good thing is that you can reuse that blueprint, so that all the settings you’ve recorded in RBAC, Azure Policies, and similar can be applied to any new subscription.
This allows your development team to quickly stand up new environments based on this blueprint, with the certainty that they’re compliant. Azure Blueprints will save you a lot of manual work and uncertainty.
