Getting Ahead of the Curve With Governance Security

As a leader in the public cloud space, Microsoft Azure has a plethora of information available for clients and the curious. One of our favorites is the Standard Enterprise Governance Guide, a step-by-step resource through 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 the governance of those resources, to identifying policy definitions.

Download Now: Into the Blue: How to Succeed in Your Path to the Cloud with Microsoft Azure

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

Key takeaways from the guide

If your enterprise is looking to get ahead of the curve when it comes to good governance on Microsoft Azure, we recommend taking these steps:

• Identify what compliance needs are for your enterprise and the amount of auditing that will be required.
• Understand if there are any geography requirements, such as data needing to stay within its country of origin.
• Ensure you are following best practices for DHCP assignments and naming conventions, which will greatly simplify 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

As robust and sound as the guide is, there are occasions when we’ve found the need to go another route with our clients.

Most of the time, this happens when the customer has an application or environment that cannot follow the process due to technical limitations.

Legacy applications—or “home-built” applications—that have lost their original development teams are a likely culprit because changes are usually very difficult to implement.

When that happens, we always work to isolate the noncompliant environment and applications from the compliant ones and we ensure firewall rules are in place to control communications between the environments.

For more about leveraging the cloud, download our free resource Into the Blue: How to Succeed in Your Path to the Cloud with Microsoft Azure.

Get your free whitepaper

Into the Blue: How to Succeed in Your Path to the Cloud with Microsoft Azure