Governance is a Journey, Not a Destination 

From personal and financial information to data protection and cybersecurity, compliance teams have more to manage each year. For example, multinational organizations can be accountable for meeting dozens of regulations to be compliant. In order to meet these compliance requirements your IT teams must be able to capture and aggregate relevant telemetry data, event logs and audit logs your governance team needs to evaluate risks and identify gaps in security and non-security compliance requirements.  

Governance Policy Adherence 

Your organization’s overall governance compliance is only as effective as the controls and monitoring that are put in place. Ensure that your IT teams have implemented automated monitoring systems for your cloud infrastructure that capture the relevant logs data you need to evaluate risks. Be proactive in monitoring these systems to ensure prompt detection and mitigation of potential policy violation, and ensure your monitoring strategy is in line with your operational needs 

Azure services that will support this effort: 

• Azure Policy Dashboard - One of the biggest benefits of Azure Policy is the insight and controls it provides over resources once policies have been defined and implemented. Assuming your Azure resources have policies assigned to them, the dashboard shows a list of any that are out of compliance. 

• Azure Monitor – Implement monitoring for the data that will feed governance KPI’s and metrics. This important data will over time guide decisions on whether your governance strategy is meeting requirements or if adjustments need to be made to any of your policy definitions. 

With proper monitoring in place, it’s a good idea to review key metrics and KPI’s on a quarterly and yearly cadence. Use this review process to go over policies that are not meeting the goals of your governance strategy, and make adjustments accordingly. 

Mind the Gaps 

Security is a unique concern when it comes to governance policy compliance. The threat landscape is a rapidly evolving risk to your organization’s critical data and infrastructure. As such, security warrants its own unique governance strategy and toolset to manage. Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel support a comprehensive approach to ensuring the protection of your cloud resources. 

• Azure Security Center – provides capabilities in three main areas, cloud security posture management, cloud workload protection and data security. Security Center is not intended for advanced security operations (SecOps) hunting scenarios or to be a SIEM tool. 

• Azure Sentinel – is Microsoft’s SIEM and security orchestration and automated response (SOAR) capability solution. With Azure Sentinel you can collect data at cloud scale (across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds), integrate curated alerts, detect previously undetected threats and respond to incidents rapidly. 

Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel work side-by-side to ensure your critical cloud resources are guarded and alert you when incidents do happen. 

For organizations interested in managing compliance of their governance strategy, InCycle can accelerate your efforts. How are you managing your resources in Azure?  Ask yourself some simple questions:  

• Do you know where your Azure resources are being created? 
• Are your resource provisioning standards consistent?
• Are you able to audit and enforce consistent provisioning policies? 
• Can you decommission projects with confidence? 
• Can you recreate resources in Azure with confidence? 
  

If you don’t know the answers to these questions you may have cloud governance blind spots.   Download our Azure Governance Playbook to learn more about modern cloud governance.