Azure Platform Governance is a strategic enabler which determines guidelines, processes and technologies how to build a secure Azure environment according to best practices and organization requirements. Azure Platform Governance document gathers all these requirements to 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 unified way of creating/developing services
- Ensure operational excellency
- Ensure business continuity
Template
I published a sample template for Azure Platform Governance in Github. Azure Platform Governance template has defined structure which contains eight main policies which are introduced below. Requirements for all these main policies should be determined always per organization. Template also has some recommendations and best practices.
Template has got influences from 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 organization's guidelines how to produce Management groups & Azure subscriptions and how to model Resource Groups.
Naming convention policy
Naming convention policy ensures standardized and unified naming for all Azure Resources across multiple subscriptions.
Compliency policy
Typically organizations have many compliency related requirements. Compliency 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 resourcetype specific recommendations.
Security policy
Security policy determines best practices how services must be developed to Azure platform to ensure hardened security.
Operational excellency policy
Operational excellency policy defines what kind of tools and processes teams must implement and follow to ensure that production environment is working and if something happens then team is notified about the situation.
Disaster Recovery policy
Disaster recovery focuses on business continuity and ensuring that environment and applications are up and running as soon as possible after disaster situation.
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