Microsoft Azure Policy
Microsoft Azure Policy is a key component of Azure governance that enables you to create, assign, and manage policies. These policies enforce different rules and effects over your resources, helping to ensure your corporate standards and service level agreements are maintained throughout your entire Azure environment.
Azure Policy is designed to help users manage and prevent IT issues, providing you with the capability to manage resources consistency, enforce compliance requirements, and prevent resource deployment if they fail to adhere to the policy. Let’s dive into a detailed outlook of Azure Policy.
Purpose of Azure Policy
- Maintaining Compliance: Azure Policy aids in managing compliance with regulations imposed by internal policies or external regulations. This includes policies that force certain requirements, like mandating the use of specific resource types, or forbidding others.
- Enforcing Rules: Azure Policy helps to enforce organizational rules on resources, to ensure compliance with corporate standards, cost constraints, and best practices.
- Assessment Reports: Azure Policy provides detailed assessment reports helping you continuously evaluate the state of your Azure environment against the conditions defined in a policy. The initiative, assignment, and non-compliance data are stored for changes over time.
- Resource Standardization: It helps in standardizing resource deployment by enforcing certain conventions like naming conventions, provision of specific regions, etc.
- Protecting Resources: Azure Policy helps prevent inadvertent resource deletion by protecting specific resources.
Below is a simple table that shows the comparison between Azure Policy and Governance.
| Azure Policy | Azure Governance | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Enforce rules to manage resources. | Manage your digital estate. |
| Features | Compliance tracking, policy enforcement, and evaluation. | Budgets, convictions, and compliance tracking. |
| Key Benefits | Standardize resources, protect resources, and maintain costs. | Manage, invest, and implement resources. |
Let’s move to some specific examples, which Azure Policy can help with:
Example 1: Ensuring a Storage Account Should Always Have Secure Transfer Enabled
Users often leave the Secure transfer option turned off, though it is recommended to transfer data securely which requires all requests to a storage account to be made over HTTPS. Azure Policy can enforce this by denying any Storage Accounts without Secure transfer enabled.
Here is the policy expression to deny creation of Storage Accounts without secure transfer:
{
“if”: {
“allOf”: [
{
“field”: “type”,
“equals”: “Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts”
},
{
“field”: “Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/supportsHttpsTrafficOnly”,
“equals”: “false”
}
]
},
“then”: {
“effect”: “deny”
}
}
Example 2: Enforcing a Specified Tag’s Value
If company policy requires a tag of “Cost Center” for costing purposes, you can enforce this at deployment time with Azure Policy. Here is a simple policy definition that enforces a tag of “Cost Center” and a value of “Finance” otherwise denial.
{
“if”: {
“field”: “tags[‘Cost Center’]”,
“notEquals”: “Finance”
},
“then”: {
“effect”: “deny”
}
}
With these examples, we can see how Azure Policy helps us to apply guardrails to our Azure environment to align with our corporate policies.
In conclusion, Azure Policy is a powerful management tool that gives you the power to enforce, audit, and report on the compliance status of your Azure resources. Whether you are a small business looking to ensure cost efficiency or a large enterprise with strict regulatory compliance, Azure Policy can help to manage and effect the rules you create.
Practice Test
True or False: Azure Policy enhances compliance as it enables you to enforce resource consistency.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Policy is a service in Azure that helps to enforce organizational policies, assess compliance at scale and also fits the need of enhancing resource consistency.
Which of the following is a purpose of Azure Policy?
- A. Cloud cost management
- B. Enforcing organizational standards
- C. Website hosting
- D. Email marketing
Answer: B. Enforcing organizational standards
Explanation: Azure Policy helps meet the resource consistency, resource compliance, and regulatory requirements of your organization.
True or False: Azure Policy cannot prevent resources from being created in specific regions.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Policy can prevent resources from being deployed to certain locations thus giving you control over locations for your deployments.
How does Azure Policy help in managing and preventing IT security risks?
- A. By mitigating risks through controlling computer hardware
- B. By enabling you to enforce policies and assess compliance at scale
- C. By managing firewall settings
- D. By managing the number of users
Answer: B. By enabling you to enforce policies and assess compliance at scale
Explanation: Azure Policy helps to enforce policies and assess compliance at scale. Thus it helps you to prevent IT security risks that could cause potential harm to your organization.
True or False: Azure Policy can audit the settings for resources and take action upon non-compliance.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Policy can audit settings of existing resources and take action when a resource falls out of compliance, enabling continuous policy enforcement and compliance assessment.
Which of the following is NOT an example of Azure Policy initiative?
- A. Allow SQL Server Transparent Data Encryption
- B. Audit VMs that do not use managed disks
- C. Constraints on Azure Virtual Network features
- D. Analyzing website traffic data
Answer: D. Analyzing website traffic data
Explanation: Azure Policy initiatives are built-in policy definitions like Allow SQL Server Transparent Data Encryption, Audit VMs that do not use managed disks, Constraints on Azure Virtual Network features etc. Analyzing website traffic data is not an example of an Azure Policy initiative.
True or False: Azure Policy provides a unified view of the overall policy compliance of your organization.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Policy provides a unified view of policy compliance. Your team can manage the status of your resources and their compliance against the policies you created and assigned in your environment.
Azure Policy cannot be applied to which of the following Azure resources?
- A. Storage Accounts
- B. Virtual Machines
- C. Virtual Networks
- D. None of the above
Answer: D. None of the above
Explanation: Azure Policy can be applied to any Azure resource including Storage Accounts, Virtual Machines, and Virtual Networks.
True or False: Azure Policy only responds to non-compliant resources by flagging them.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Policy can moreover respond by automatically remedying the non-compliant resources back to a compliant state.
Azure Policy can monitor compliance in which cadence?
- A. Real-time
- B. Hourly
- C. Daily
- D. Monthly
Answer: A. Real-time
Explanation: Azure Policy is always monitoring compliance in real-time against your specific rules. This allows for immediate response and correction.
True or False: Azure Policy service is only available in selected regions.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Policy service is a global service and available in all the Azure regions.
What is the main purpose of Azure Policy evaluation?
- A. To identify future development needs
- B. To determine resource compliance with assigned policies
- C. To evaluate performance of Azure services
- D. To provide customer feedback
Answer: B. To determine resource compliance with assigned policies
Explanation: The main purpose of Azure Policy evaluation is to assess the compliance of resources with the policies assigned.
True or False: Azure Policy can also help with cost governance by preventing overspending in Azure.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Policy can prevent the creation of more costly resources and mitigate the risk of overspending.
Azure Policy is primarily designed for:
- A. Marketing analysis
- B. Data analytics
- C. Governance, compliance, and management
- D. Project management
Answer: C. Governance, compliance, and management
Explanation: Azure Policy is designed to be used for resource management, enforcing various rules and effects over your resources, so those resources stay compliant with your corporate standards and service level agreements.
True or False: Azure Policy is a full audit solution, providing complete historical log capabilities.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Policy helps to identify existing non-compliant resources, however, it does not provide complete historical log capabilities, which are typically associated with a full audit solution.
Interview Questions
What is the primary purpose of Azure Policy?
Azure Policy is a service in Azure that helps to manage and prevent IT issues by implementing and enforcing rules across the resources within a given subscription or management group.
How does Azure Policy maintain control over your environment?
Azure Policy does this by evaluating resources for non-compliance with assigned policies. It helps to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance.
Can Azure Policy evaluate the resources while creating them?
Yes, Azure Policy evaluates resources both during their creation and for existing resources on an ongoing basis.
What is the difference between Azure Policy and Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)?
Azure Policy is centered around resource properties during deployment and later for already existing resources, while Azure RBAC focuses on providing fine-grained access management to Azure resources.
Can Azure Policy change resources into compliance?
Yes. You can use Azure Policy to automatically remediate and bring non-compliant resources back into compliance.
What is a policy definition within Azure Policy?
A policy definition is a statement that expresses what to evaluate and what action to take. It includes conditions under which it is enforced and the effect that takes place when the conditions are met.
What does Azure Policy initiative definition consist of?
Azure Policy initiative definition is a set or group of policy definitions that help track your compliance state for a larger goal.
How is the compliance state evaluated in Azure Policy?
The compliance state is evaluated by the policy assignment which is the association of a policy definition or initiative definition to a specific scope.
What role does the policy parameters play in Azure Policy?
Policy parameters help to simplify policy management by reducing the number of policy definitions required. They help in making policy definition generic and used with different values for different assignments.
Can Azure Policy be used for tracking cost or resource usage?
Yes, Azure Policy not only ensures compliance, but also helps in cost management and tallying resource usage.
What happens if a resource is non-compliant with a policy?
When a resource is found to be non-compliant during a policy assignment, Azure Policy can trigger a logical response that ranges from denying the creation of the resource to simply sending an alert or notification.
Can Azure Policy automatically fix non-compliant resources?
Yes, with remediation tasks, Azure Policy can automatically bring non-compliant resources back to compliance with the rules defined in a policy.
What does the ‘audit’ effect do in Azure Policy?
The ‘audit’ effect doesn’t stop resource creation or update. It just logs a warning event to the activity log when a request doesn’t match the policy.
Can Azure Policy be applied at multiple levels?
Yes, Azure Policy can be assigned at the management group, subscription, or resource group level.
Can we use Azure Policy along with Azure Blueprints?
Yes, Azure Policy can be used in conjunction with Azure Blueprints to create an environment with a specific governance structure and compliance requirements.
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