Master Azure Policy to Save Money in Your Azure Environment

In today’s cloud-centric world, efficient resource management is crucial. Azure Policy helps an organization ensure the enforcement of governance and cost control within their Azure environments. We will cover the most important aspects of Azure Policy to help you start saving costs in your environment today.

Understanding Azure Policy

Azure Policy is a service in Azure that enables one to create, assign, and manage policies that control or govern your environment. These policies implement various rules and effects on resources to ensure their compliance with your corporate standards and service level agreements. Some of the use cases of policy include cost governance, security enhancement, and compliance maintenance.

Main Problems Azure Policy Solves

1. Uncontrolled Resource Deployment: Without governance, users can deploy resources with inconsistent configurations causing high costs. By using Azure Policy you can create guardrails, preventing oversized or unnecessary resource deployments.
2. Poor Visibility: By default, Azure out-of-the-box natively provides limited visibility into what resources are being used and by whom. Policies can enhance visibility by filtering and reporting on resource compliance.
3. Inconsistent Configurations: Inconsistent configuration settings across resources may give a way to security vulnerabilities and efficiencies. Policies help maintain consistency in configuration, such as insisting on particular storage account settings or virtual machine sizes.

Cost Control with Azure Policy Implementation

Azure Policy allows you to control the resource types, sizes, and configurations that can be deployed. Some of the key policies for cost control include :

• Tagging Policies: Tagging is considered very important in organizing and managing resources. With tagging policies, you make sure that all your resources are tagged with relevant metadata like cost centres, project names, or environment types, and this makes sure proper tracking is done to keep the costs under control.
• Unused Resources Policies: Regular auditing and cleanup of unused resources prevent unnecessary costs. Policies can easily detect and flag resources that have remained idle beyond a certain period.
• Allowed Virtual Machine Size SKUs: Controls the size of virtual machines available for deployment; this can block the usage of oversized, expensive VMs.

Advanced Management of Policy

Advanced scenarios are supported by Azure Policy, including:

• Custom Messages: These are custom messages you show users when their actions are blocked or when resources are found non-compliant.
• Initiative: Sets of policies collected together to reinforce or achieve a common objective, including regulatory compliance.
• Exemption: Provides the ability for certain resources or sets of resources to be exempt from some policies, providing flexibility while maintaining overall governance.

Custom Messages

Custom messages in Azure Policy is an underused but vital feature, that enable Developers to give specific, informative feedback to users when their actions are blocked, or resources are found to be non-compliant. This will help users understand why a policy is in place and what they need to do to comply with it. Use the following tenants when creating custom messages to ensure you get he most value out of them;

1. Clarity: A custom message could give instructions or explanations to help reduce confusion and better explain the requirements of the policy to the user.
2. Guidance: They can point the user in the appropriate direction – choose an allowed resource type, contact an administrator or some other action.
3. Context: A custom message can include contextually relevant information like why the restriction occurred, or who is responsible for the policy.

Example Scenarios

Here are a few such scenarios where custom messages turn out most beneficial:

• Tagging Policy: “All resources must have a ‘CostCenter’ tag. Please add this tag to your resource or contact the IT department for assistance.”
• Location Restrictions: “Resources can only be deployed in the ‘West Europe’ region. Please pick ‘West Europe’ or contact support for further information.
• Quotas: “Only small and medium VM sizes are allowed in this environment to control costs. Please choose an appropriate size.” 

Understanding Initiatives in Azure Policy

Within Azure Policy, an initiative is a collection of several policies combined to achieve a broader compliance goal. An initiative makes managing policies easier by managing the set of policies as one unit. It is very useful in regulatory standards compliance when you want to apply a bundle of policies that represent all necessary requirements as a whole.

Key features of an initiative

1. Policies Grouping: Initiatives allow setting similar policies as a group. In this regard, encryption, network security, and identity management policies can be grouped under one initiative for security compliance.
2. Simplified Management: Policies can be more easily assigned, updated, and monitored by managing them as a group. This decreases the administrative overhead and ensures consistency within your environment.
3. Tracking of Compliance: Initiatives provide an integrated view of compliance status to make it much easier to track and report on compliance for several policies.

Regulatory Compliance Initiatives

One-click regulatory compliance initiatives are pre-configured sets of policies to assist organizations in meeting specific regulatory requirements. Azure provides several built-in one-click regulatory compliance initiatives for common standards such as ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.

Examples of Regulatory Compliance Initiatives

1. ISO 27001: This project includes policies to create compliance with the ISO 27001 standard, which outlines the requirements intended for use in establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an ISMS.
2. PCI DSS: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard initiative includes policies that help organizations take care of cardholder data and maintain a secure environment.
3. HIPAA: The policies for HIPAA initiatives cover the security of sensitive patient data and adherence to healthcare regulations.

Understanding Azure Policy Exemptions

In Azure, policy exemptions allow resources or hierarchies of resources to be excluded from the evaluation of initiatives & policies. This helps in cases where resources, for temporary or permanent reasons, need to be exempt based on certain business needs or have alternative standards.

Key Features of Policy Exemptions.

1. Exemption Category: “Waiver” or “Mitigated”. Waiver is used when the resource is exempt from policy evaluation based on business needs. Mitigated is used when compensating controls are put in place for the resource.
2. Expiration: Allows you to set an expiration date, this can be useful if you want to allow time for a team to make changes to their workload before having to meet compliance standards.

Use of Policy Exemptions

Policy exemptions are useful in a couple of the following scenarios:

1. Temporary Waivers: These would be when a resource has to be exempted from a policy on a temporary basis-for example, during the process of migration or upgrade.
2. Business Exceptions: When a particular business requirement calls for exemption from a policy-in the case of a legacy system that cannot support the latest standards.
3. Testing and Development: Resources in a development or test environment have to be exempted from certain policies for flexibility and experimentation.
4. Controls Mitigated: A resource may have other alternate compensating controls to mitigate the risk addressed by the policy; such a resource shall be exempt from the policy evaluation.

Conclusion

Azure Policy is an essential component in ensuring that you have appropriate governance and cost control in place for Azure. Effective implementation and management of policies ensure that compliance, security, and resource utilization optimization are assured. For further details, please refer to our prior webinars and resources on Azure cost management or get in touch with us by going to the Contact Us page.