Regulatory compliance is a critical aspect for organizations across various industries. Be it sensitive financial data, information about patient healthcare, or government records, all forms of sensitive data have to be aligned with the regulatory standards so that the stakeholder can continue to place their trust in organizations and avoid relevant legal consequences.
Azure Regulatory Policy gives detailed compliance guidance that helps organizations implement such requirements with ease. In this blog post, we will be covering what Azure Regulatory Policy is, why it’s important, and how you can use it to ensure your cloud environment is compliant with applicable standards.
What is Azure Regulatory Policy?
Azure Regulatory Compliance is an Azure Policy feature that provides built-in initiatives covering various regulatory standards for auditing organizations’ cloud environments and securing them. These one-click policies are collections of policies predefined for compliance needs, such as PCI DSS, NIST, and UK NHS. These initiatives make implementation simple and give structure to an otherwise unwieldly challenge.
Why use Azure Regulatory Compliance?
- Automated Compliance: Not only does it keep you in compliance, but Azure’s out-of-the-box initiatives automatically apply compliance settings to your resources. It ensures that your environment will always meet the standards it needs to, without an extensive audit by hand.
- Extensive Coverage: The out-of-the-box programs cover a very comprehensive range of compliance needs, including PCI DSS on payment card data, NIST on federal information systems, and others on healthcare and government organizations. This wide-ranging coverage makes it easier and more feasible for organizations to obtain and implement the relevant policies applicable to their specific needs.
- Improved Visibility: Through the utilization of Azure’s regulatory policy, the organization gains an understanding of compliance status. The compliance status of resources, whether compliant or not, will be elaborated in a comprehensive report in the Azure portal. Allowing you to identify resources that are not compliant and to remediate them as fast as possible.
- Simplified Management: Managing compliance across a large cloud environment can be quite cumbersome. Azure Regulatory Policy simplifies this by collating related policies into initiatives, thereby making it easier to manage and monitor your entire environment for compliance .
Key Features of Azure Regulatory Compliances
Built-in Initiatives
Azure Policy for Regulatory Compliance The regulatory compliance in Azure Policy provides built-in initiatives related to different regulatory standards. These are groups of related policies that together contribute to the overall compliance state for a given standard. For example, the PCI-DSS initiative includes policies relevant to cardholder data security, while the NIST initiative includes policies applicable to access control and audit management.
Custom Initiatives
Apart from the given initiatives, an organization can develop its own initiative tailor-made towards its needs and compliance. This therefore creates an avenue for the organization to comply with regulations that are unique to their situations and which the built-in initiatives have not catered to.
Compliance Dashboard
The compliance dashboard in the Azure portal allows you to have an overview of your compliance status. It shows the compliance state of each control within an initiative, including detailed information about non-compliant resources and steps toward remediation.
Using Azure Regulatory Policy
Step 1: Access the Azure Portal
Proceed with the Azure Regulatory Policy by logging into the Azure portal, and select the Azure Policy service. By looking at policy definitions, you will see the list of built-in initiatives and you are able to create a custom policy if required.
Step 2: Choose Initiative
Browse through the listed initiatives and select the initiative that matches your compliance need. Suppose you need to achieve the compliance of the PCI DSS initiative. Then you will choose the PCI DSS initiative. You may want to use categories to filter the initiatives and more easily find the regulatory compliance initiatives.
Step 3: Assign the Initiative
Once you’ve identified an initiative, you’ll need to assign it to the appropriate scope within your Azure environment. The scope could be a subscription, a resource group, or even just an individual resource, however, ensure that all resources thar you wish to be complaint with your chosen regulations are covered within the scope.
Step 4: Monitor Compliance
After onboarding the initiative, the compliance dashboard should be used to monitor the compliance status of your resources. It delivers a report of the compliant versus the non-compliant resources in a comprehensive way and gives recommendations as well for remediation steps for the non-compliant resources.
Azure Regulatory Compliance Scenarios
Azure Regulatory Compliance is used by organizations from various walks of life that observe compliance based on regulatory standards. Here are a few examples:
Financial Services
Financial institutions must adhere to strict rules and regulations in order to keep such sensitive financial data secure. Using the compliance initiative of the PCI DSS, these organizations can help ensure that their Azure environments meet the required security baseline for handling payment card data.
Health Care
Health care organizations protect patient information through regulations such as HIPAA and UK NHS standards. Initiatives such as UK OFFICAL and UK NHS, are aligned with these regulations, supporting health care providers to secure their data while guaranteeing compliance.
Government
Government organizations are supposed to follow different regulatory norms and policies that protect the sensitive information. Azure Regulatory Compliance Policy includes initiatives for standards such as NIST, UK government compliance, and many other international regulations which enables these agencies to ensure their Azure environments meet the required security and compliance controls.
Conclusion
Azure Regulatory Compliance is a powerful toolkit for any organization that wishes to make sure their cloud environments remain compliant with all regulatory requirements. It enables organizations to automate compliance, provides greater visibility into compliance status, and streamlines compliance control management through out-of-the-box and custom initiatives. Be it financial services, healthcare, or government, Azure Regulatory Policy helps you meet your regulatory requirements and protect sensitive data.
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