Azure Governance Audit
Ensuring your Azure Environment is Optimised, Reliable, Secure & Compliant
Introduction
As your organisation adopts cloud, it inevitably means an increase in the number of cloud services being provisioned. In turn that can increase the risk that cloud has to your organisation. Successfully embracing cloud services requires a different approach to how we adopt, manage and govern the environment. Keeping control of your Cloud
Governance is one way to ensure you stay on top of the risks.
Introducing our 3 Day Comprehensive Cloud Governance Audit. We define Cloud Governance as having identified business risks with documented policy statements laying out the standards, architectural best practices and goals. Having metrics and processes detailed to ensure adherence to policy statements. Finally, having aligned the risks to one
or more of the five pillars for effective Cloud Governance.
Cloud Guardian Service
Our Cloud Governance role will provide you with a Cloud Governance Framework minimum viable product (MVP). That framework will contain the risks, goals and standards, metrics and indicators, compliance processes / checks and tool recommendations. If you have a large Azure estate with multiple subscriptions, we highly recommend you utilise the services of a 3rd party specialist cloud consultancy firm such as SR Cloud Solutions to continually review your cloud governance on a monthly basis.
A popular service is our Cloud Guardian monthly review service that enables our team of cloud consultants to oversee that your cloud infrastructure is well governed utilising the five pillars of cloud governance. For more information regarding our Cloud Guardian service, please speak with your SR Cloud Solutions representative today.
Our Cloud Guardian service ensures security and governance policy compliance of your cloud infrastructure is in line with industry best practice.
The ultimate benefit of utilising SR’s Cloud Guardian service is it provides total peace of mind to our clients and ensures that their Azure infrastructures are running optimally, securely, and within budget.
Why choose SR Cloud Solutions?
We provide top-tier Azure managed services to help reduce operational risks. Our experts possess the skillset, insights, and experience required to migrate and manage the entirety of your cloud lifecycle with diligence.
We take care of everything from developing personalised cloud solutions to managing workload migrations. When it comes to stellar cloud management and monitoring, we’re the best in the game.
Also, we assist users to reduce security risks and ensure that the firm doesn’t fall victim to modern cloud security problems. From managing multi-cloud environments to ensuring compliance, we take care of it all.
- The best technology – highest levels of accreditation with the world’s leading vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto.
- Skills and expertise with a UK-based 24/7 Security Operations Centre (SOC).
- We are a Joscar accredited business which means we are certified to work with leading defense companies who require the highest standards of cyber security.
- We are experts in Cloud infrastructures such as Microsoft Azure so we can provide expert consultancy on migrations, hybrid cloud environments, security, cost optimisations, application modernisation and cloud governance.
Book a meeting with one of our consultants to learn more about our Azure Governance Audit Services.
Services in Azure Governance
We will describe each of the different services as they apply to this management framework.
Management Groups
For some, the subscription could be the boundary of management. This boundary allowed organizations to use multiple subscriptions to “separate” resources from each other. Some organizations subscribe geographically, others use a dedicated subscription for a specific application workload, and others separate base on dev/test and production environments. Management groups give you management at scale no matter what type of subscriptions you might have. However, all subscriptions within a single management group must trust the same Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant.
Recently with the introduction of management groups, this model changed. Where Azure Policy and Initiative were great sources of management, they were linked to a single subscription. This was hard to manage in larger environments where admins wanted to replicate security policy settings across multiple subscriptions. That’s precisely what management groups provide: a cross-subscription assignment of Azure Policy and Initiative.
Identity and RBAC
Again, identity is vital in a public cloud platform. The examples we saw earlier should already clarify. Still, there is yet another example I can share: Azure itself heavily relies on role-based access control (Azure RBAC) to identify who can do what in the platform.
This “who” can be a person or group from your Active Directory, a user from another Azure Active Directory tenant, or a non-person identity like a registered service principal.
RBAC offers nearly 100 different roles to choose from, and if you cannot find the specific role mapping for the particular need of your organization, you can create custom roles.
Azure Policy
Another source of oversight is available through Azure Policy. This is a true governance management and control mechanism. As an organisation, you define policies: JSON files in which you specify what Azure resource requirements you want to enforce before the deployment of resources can succeed. For example, there is forcing the usage of certain regions because of compliance regulations, or allowing only specific virtual machine sizes in your subscription to keep costs in control, or perhaps you might have particular naming standards you want to enforce for resources, optimising your asset management and CMDB regulations.
One last example of something that many companies find useful is implementing the use of tags. A tag is like a label attached to a Resource Group or individual resources, for example, a cost center or business unit. Thanks to these tags, a billing administrator can get a clear view of what a resource is used for or which cost center this resource belongs to.
Azure policies can be grouped together into Azure policy initiatives, making it so you can enforce several policies at once. After the policies are defined, they must be assigned to a scope. This scope can be a subscription, a resource group, or individual resources.
Azure Blueprints
Azure Blueprints allow cloud teams to define a structure of reusable, repeatable instructions for deployment and configuration in compliance with company standards, regulations, controls, and requirements.
Relying on a combination of roles, controls, and infrastructure as code, Azure Blueprints orchestrates the full deployment life cycle of resources.
Everything in Azure is based on Azure resources, including dynamic names that you cannot change once created. Other services are deployed in a fixed namespace domain, so it’s important to have naming standards.
Naming standards
Everything in Azure is based on Azure resources, including dynamic names that you cannot change once created. Other services are deployed in a fixed namespace domain so it’s important to have naming standards.
Resource Groups
Simply, they are groups of resources. For the most part, Microsoft is not enforcing what resources should go where and how you want to organize your resource groups. Some organisations have a resource group per resource type, while others define Resource Groups based on workloads or location.
Because most resources on the platform are region-specific, specifying the location is a hard requirement for any resource. Complexity arises when you have a Resource Group in one location while containing resources in a different location. While technically acceptable, this might cause interruptions when the Azure region that the Resource Group is in is not reachable anymore. The resources remain, but you wouldn’t be able to make any changes to the resource.
Benefits of our 3 Day Azure Governance Audit
In-Depth Analysis
In depth analysis into your Azure infrastructure and applications by one of our certified Azure consultants
Optimise Costs
Optimise costs & resource utilisation to improve efficiency
Identify and Mitigate Risks
Identify and mitigate the risks associated with your existing architecture in terms of security and resource consistency
Benchmark your environment
Benchmark your current Azure setup against best practice
Innovate Faster
Innovate faster to get the most out of your Azure environment
Stay secure and compliant
We help you leverage Azure’s secure best practices to strengthen your infrastructure security and counter cyberthreats.
Join Other Leading Companies Who Trust SR Cloud Solutions
Frequently Asked Questions
“Governance” is the framework that determines how your organisation conducts business activities, based on objectives and responsibilities. And when we talk about Cloud Governance, there are a number of principles that are relevant: Subscription Management, Cost Management, Security, Resource Consistency, Identity Baseline & Deployment Acceleration.
You lay down the rules – also known as the “guard rails” – for these disciplines early on in the development process. Your development team must always adhere to these rules. The earlier you implement Governance in your development process, the better, because it’s difficult to establish the rules retroactively in an existing environment. But what kind of rules should there be?
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 organisation 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 organisation, 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 organisation.
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 partner, we offer our customers cost management tool built into Azure as part of New Commerce Experience that helps gain insight into costs.
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.
The business case for Azure Governance
So how do you create a business case around Azure Governance? We’ve put together a few high-level points below that should get you started:
- Reduce costs
- Understand who is using what and why
- Take advantage of reduced pricing – Develop/Test systems, Reserved Instances for highly utilized virtual machine’s
- Use automation to reduce number of systems running when not required
2. Reduce complexity of supporting the environment
- Reduce complexity of services by following best practice
- Reduce number of vendors (single Cloud provider)
- Standardisation of configuration and deployment
3. Ability to scale the environment efficiently
- Supports innovation, ongoing evolution and growth of the business
4. Increased complexity and cost the longer you wait to implement governance
5. Minimise operational and reputational risks from a security perspective
6. Ability to track cost more granularly for each service or department
Remember you pay for what you consume in any cloud computing environment. If you don’t have a handle on your consumption, you can and will quickly consume more than you budgeted for. Without governance, I would argue that it is impossible to successfully operate highly available systems, in turn impacting revenue and/or reputation. Governance can also help ensure environments meet company and legal compliance and security rules.
Microsoft defines Azure management as “the tasks and processes required to maintain your business applications and the resources that support them.” The platform has many services and tools that manage your cloud environment entirely. You can think about it like a map that helps take care of all areas needed for effective use of Azure, from deployment through maintenance processes – such as backup and troubleshooting when things don’t go according to plan.
The following diagram illustrates the different areas of management that Microsoft believes are required to maintain any application or resource.
We cover all areas relating to the full management of Azure, with Azure Governance one of the key management areas that is required as your Azure environment grows.
Speak to one of our Azure EXPERTS
Get in touch to begin your journey with our experts and find out how Azure Governance can help your business
