With cloud compliance and governance becoming vital, organizations must have a way to enforce policies across the board for consistent and compliant infrastructure. Azure Policy helps to maintain the security and compliance of Azure environments. What is Azure Policy? What are its capabilities, and practical applications in managing cloud resources effectively?
What is Azure Policy?
With Azure Policy, you can enforce custom organizational standards, including compliance policies at scale in your environment, all from the Azure Portal. Azure Policy includes a compliance dashboard to assess the overall state of compliance in your Azure environment.
You can also look at a per-resource, per-policy basis. This functionality helps reduce blind spots in the environment that may lead to compliance violations and other negative outcomes.
Organizations can use this for the following:
- Governance
- Compliance
- Security
- Cost reduction
- Management
Some common use cases include enforcing simple rules like, ensuring all resources are tagged to more complex requirements, such as enforcing regulatory compliance standards across your entire Azure environment. Many may use it to enforce resource compliance, such as to ensure a specific resource group is located in a particular region.
Microsoft has also made it easier to get started by providing policy definitions for common use cases by way of built-ins to help you get started. You can go here to find a list of management policies: List of built-in policy initiatives – Azure Policy. Use the Browser’s search feature to find the specific category property you are looking for and the built in links to the GitHub repo which you can use to create policies.
Azure policy features
- Azure Policy and Regulatory Compliance – Using Azure Policy provides the ability to simplify regulatory compliance. With built-in policies tailored for various compliance standards, Azure Policy helps ensure that your cloud resources adhere to necessary regulations, reducing the risk of non-compliance and the associated penalties
- Utilizing Policy Definitions for Virtual Machines – Azure Policy extends its reach to virtual machines, enabling you to enforce policies that range from setting security baselines to ensuring that VMs are deployed with specific configurations. This ensures consistency and compliance across all your virtual machine deployments
- Azure Key Vault and Policy Integration – Key Vault integration with Azure Policy enhances security and governance. By applying policies to Key Vaults, you can ensure that your keys and secrets are managed according to your organization’s security standards, adding an extra layer of protection to your sensitive data
- Managing Guest Configurations through Azure Policy – Azure Policy’s guest configuration feature allows you to manage and audit settings inside your machines, both in Azure and on-premises. This capability is important to help make sure internal compliance and security requirements are met, not just at the cloud resource level but also within the operating systems of your machines
- Identifying Non-Compliant Resources – Azure Policy allows admins to identify non-compliant resources. This feature identifies resources that don’t adhere to organization policies and take corrective action
- Remediation Tasks and Azure Policy – When non-compliance is detected, Azure Policy allows you to create remediation tasks to bring resources back into compliance. This automated response is vital for maintaining the overall health and compliance of your Azure environment
When are policies evaluated?
Note the following times that resources are evaluated against the policy definitions
- A policy assignment is applied when a resource within its scope is created or modified
- When a new policy or initiative is assigned to a particular scope
- Whenever there’s an update to a policy or initiative already assigned to a scope
- The regular compliance assessment cycle takes place every 24 hours
How does Azure Policy compare with Role-based Access Control?
Azure Policy and role-based access control (RBAC) are both important when it comes to governing Azure. Both serve different functions. Note the following:
- Azure Policy is centered on managing the properties of resources, both existing and those in deployment.
- RBAC, on the other hand, is concerned with regulating user actions across various scopes
The Role of Policy Definitions in Azure
An important aspect of Azure Policy is something called Policy definitions. What are they? They are the conditions under which your policies are applied. Each policy definition includes a set of conditions and the effect if those conditions are met. These definitions ensure that Azure resources comply with corporate standards and SLAs.
These rules are written in JSON format and can be grouped into a policy initiative or policy set, when you have several business rules combined. It can also help organizations bring out of compliance resources back into compliance using what is called a remediation task.
Below is an example of the Policy Definition JSON.
What do policy definition elements include?
A policy definition typically includes these essential elements:
- Name: The title shown on the policy document.
- Description: A section for a brief description that outlines the policy’s intended effect and scope.
- Effect: Policies can have a variety of effects. For an in-depth explanation, refer to Microsoft’s guide at Azure Policy Effects. The effects include:
- Append: Alters resources by adding new fields or properties
- Audit: Marks non-compliant resources, noting their status without blocking deployment
- AuditIfNotExists: Identifies resources lacking required properties within the policy’s scope
- Deny: Prevents the deployment of non-compliant resources
- DeployIfNotExists: Triggers template deployment for non-compliant resources, as per AuditIfNotExists criteria
- Disabled: Turns off a policy’s effect, often used in test environments
- Modify: Changes properties of resources complying with the policy, applicable to both new and existing resources. Compliance can be achieved through remediation tasks.
- Category: Specifies the policy’s classification
- Location: Indicates where the policy will be applied
- ID: The unique identifier of the policy, assigned based on its name
- Type: Notes the nature of the policy, which can be Built-in, Custom, or Static
How Policy Assignments Work
Once you have your policy definitions or policy initiative assignment can happen at any scope of resources needed, including at a management group, subscription, resource groups, and even down to individual resources.
This assignment capability provides granular control over how and where your policies are enforced, ensuring the right policies are applied in the right context.
Wrapping up
With more organizations using Azure cloud resources, it is important to consider cloud governance and compliance. The Azure Policy mechanism allows businesses to enforce rules and automate compliance. It also provides insights into the current state of resources. This is an extremely helpful tool for organizations looking to leverage the cloud effectively and securely.
Read More:
Microsoft Azure Administrator: AZ-104: Viewing Role and Access Assignments – Part 11
Follow our Twitter and Facebook feeds for new releases, updates, insightful posts and more.
