What is Azure Cloud Governance ?

Microsoft Partners who build next generation applications and/or deliver services to the public sector are adopting the cloud to become more agile and save money. At the same time, public sector agencies feel the need to digitally transform and innovate. To accomplish this transformation, it is up to the partner engineering teams to deliver these high-quality services.

Given the citizen-customer focused missions within the public sector, there is a natural shift to employ DevOps in a cloud environment. In the cloud, engineers can rapidly provision the resources necessary to deliver these solutions. This newfound agility and easy access to resources comes at a price and many of our partners and agencies find it challenging to control costs as well as their sprawl in the cloud.

The good news is that both Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Azure for Government provide solutions to address these challenges. We have five products to assist you in governing your workload’s environment. These products are Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, Azure Resource Graph, Azure Management Groups, and Azure Cost Management.

From the moment you create your first subscription, these capabilities are there for you, and the best part is that they are completely free.

Azure Policy helps you manage and prevent IT issues with policy definitions that enforce rules and effects for your resources. When you use Azure Policy, resources stay compliant with your corporate standards and service level agreements. This is a good way to enforce tagging of resources!

Azure Blueprints helps you deploy and update your cloud environments in a repeatable manner using composable artifacts, such as Azure Resource Manager templates, to provision resources, role-based access controls (RBAC), and policies. Blueprints are a great way to accelerate the creation of your compliant environments!

Azure Resource Graph is a big data technology that allows you to query all your resource configuration across the entire cloud environment. Resource Graph uses a structure query language (Kusto) to explore your environment very quickly allowing visibility at scale across your entire environment. If you know SQL, Kusto will be a breeze!

Azure Management Groups – If your organization has many subscriptions, you may need a way to efficiently manage access, policies, and compliance for those subscriptions. This can be done through Azure Management Groups.

Azure Cost Management is a cost management solution that helps you monitor and control Azure spending and optimize resource use.

Partners in Government sales and implementation should get to know the five services that provide an end-to-end governance solution enabling you to build a very comprehensive Governance on Azure practice.