Getting Ahead of the Curve With Governance Security

As a leader in the public cloud space, Microsoft Azure has a massive amount of information available for both existing clients and organizations that are simply cloud curious. 

One of our favorites is the Standard Enterprise Governance Guide, a valuable resource offering a step-by-step roadmap for the stages of governance security.

Based on the constraints and needs of a fictional company, the guide walks you through the basic foundation for governance best practices—from resource organization, to governance of those resource, to identifying policy definitions.

All of the information included in the guide can be described as best practices, and although we occasionally deviate from the blueprint provided (more on that below), the resource is a must-read for any enterprise, regardless of their chosen cloud provider.

Key takeaways from the guide

If your organization is looking to get ahead of the curve for good governance on Azure, we recommend taking these steps from the guide:

• Identify the compliance needs of your organization and the amount of auditing that will be required
• Understand if there are any geography requirements, such as data that needs to stay within its country of origin
• Ensure you are following best practices for DHCP assignments and naming conventions, which greatly simplifies your migration to the public cloud
• Put a lot of thought into the tags you will use to help identify assets in the public cloud

Where we deviate from Microsoft’s framework

While Microsoft’s guide is certainly robust and informative, there are occasions when we feel the need to stray from its blueprint. 

The most common reason for this is a customer having an application or environment that cannot follow the process laid out in the guide due to technical limitations. Legacy applications, for example, that have lost their original development teams.

When that happens, we always work to isolate the non-compliant environments and applications from the compliant ones. We also ensure firewall rules are in place to control communication between environments.

These issues are not exactly widespread, and for most organizations looking to migrate to the cloud for the first time or to Azure from another provider, the Standard Enterprise Governance Guide is the perfect resource for keeping applications and data safe and secure in the cloud.

Considering adopting Microsoft Azure? Learn more about the process and how your organization can get the most out of its investment in our free guide Into the Blue: How to Succeed in Your Path to the Cloud with Microsoft Azure.