Policies on Azure play an important role in ensuring that infrastructure resources on the cloud are used in a secure, compliant, and cost-effective manner. The key purpose of policies on Azure is to provide a consistent and controlled way for organisations to manage resources and ensure that they are used in a manner that aligns with the organisational policies and standards. Policies can be broadly categorised to fall under one of three categories: Security, Governance and Compliance.
- Security: Security policies are designed to protect resources and data from unauthorized access and to ensure that resources are configured in a secure manner. This can include the need for private endpoints, enabling endpoint protection, encryption of data at rest and in transit, authentication and access controls, and enabling logging for monitoring and alerting of potential security threats. Security policies may also include controls to limit network access to resources and to enable firewalls to protect against common attack vectors such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
- Compliance: Compliance policies on Azure are designed to ensure that resources are configured and used in a manner that meets the requirements of various industry regulations and standards. This may include policies for compliance with regulations such as HIPAA for the health sector, SOC 2, and PCI DSS for the banking/financial sector. Compliance policies can also be used to ensure that resources are configured in a manner that meets the needs of your organization or are in line with widely adopted industry standards, such as policies for data retention, data classification, and incident response.
- Governance: Governance policies on Azure are designed to help organizations manage and organize resources in a consistent and controlled manner. This can include policies for tagging, naming conventions, allowed locations, resource allocation and policies that outrightly disallow the use of certain resource types or premium SKUs within specific environments such as Sandbox or Development. Governance policies can also be used to ensure that resources are used in a manner that is consistent with organizational policies and standards.
It’s important to note that these categories are not mutually exclusive to one another, and many policies will fall into multiple categories. For example, a policy that encrypts data at rest and in transit would fall into both the security and compliance categories. Additionally, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the requirements of your organization, how the policies align with them, and expand on the suggested categories above with additional categories or sub-categories as they make sense for your organisation.