Introduction
Azure Policy is a service that allows you to create, assign, and manage governance policies that enforce rules and effects over Azure resources to ensure that they stay compliant with your IT governance standards. These policies enforce various rules and effects on resources, ensuring that they adhere to corporate standards and service-level agreements. These policies are described in JSON format and are known as policy definitions. Azure Policy is crucial for enforcing organizational standards and assessing compliance on a large scale.
Azure Policy initiatives are a collection of Azure Policy definitions that are grouped together toward a specific goal or purpose. By consolidating multiple Azure policies into a single item, Azure Policy initiatives allow centralized control and enforcement of configurations across Azure resources.
Industry-specific organizations in sectors like government, public sector, finance, and others accelerate digital transformation and achieve better business outcomes. They can achieve this objective by adopting specific, sovereignty-focused Azure Policy initiatives to address the complexity of compliance with national and regional regulatory requirements.
Customers can create Azure Policy initiatives that aid in customizing deployments to reduce the time needed to audit environments and help meet established regulatory compliance frameworks and government requirements. The initiatives help public sector partners and customers create cloud guardrails and enforce specific regulations effectively. They can layer policy initiatives to help form a complete solution for their specific needs, and they can use deployment automation to ensure consistency, best practices, and save time.
In this module, you learn how Azure Policy can help do the common tasks related to creating, assigning, and managing policies across your organization, such as:
- Assign a policy to enforce a condition for resources you create in the future
- Create and assign an initiative definition to track compliance for multiple resources
- Resolve a noncompliant or denied resource
- Implement a new policy across an organization
Important
Organizations are wholly responsible for ensuring their own compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. The information provided in this document does not constitute legal advice, and organizations should consult their legal advisors for any questions regarding regulatory compliance.