Importance of Azure Platform Governance

Azure Platform Governance is a strategic enabler that determines guidelines, processes, and technologies on how to build a secure Azure environment according to best practices and organization requirements. Azure Platform Governance document gathers all these requirements into a single document. Azure Platform Governance ensures that all services developed by multiple teams across multiple subscriptions are created according to commonly agreed guidelines.

Typically Azure Platform Governance has the following focus areas

• Ensure secure solutions
• Ensure operation effectiveness
• Ensure a unified way of creating/developing services
• Ensure operational excellency
• Ensure business continuity

Template

I published a sample template for Azure Platform Governance in Github. The Azure Platform Governance template has a defined structure that contains eight main policies which are introduced below. Requirements for all these main policies should be determined always per organization. The template also has some recommendations and best practices.

The template has been influenced by the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF) and Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) which are key frameworks for cloud adoption.

Note! This is not a complete template. It's a simplified version which evolves.

Management policy

Management hierarchy policy determines the organization's guidelines on how to produce Management groups & Azure subscriptions and how to model Resource Groups.

Naming convention policy

The naming convention policy ensures standardized and unified naming for all Azure Resources across multiple subscriptions.

Compliance policy

Typically organizations have many compliance-related requirements. Compliance policy determines things like where data or services can be located and how logging should be configured across services.

Recommendations for specific Azure resources

This section contains Azure resource-specific recommendations.

Security policy

The Security policy determines best practices on how services must be developed for the Azure platform to ensure hardened security.

Operational excellence policy

Operational excellence policy defines what kind of tools and processes teams must implement and follow to ensure that the production environment is working and if something happens then the team is notified about the situation.

Disaster Recovery policy

Disaster recovery focuses on business continuity and ensuring that the environment and applications are up and running as soon as possible after a disaster situation.