"Azure Policies" Course Review

Companies hosting their hardware, software, and servers are slowly but surely becoming something of the past. Businesses are increasingly relocating their mission-critical infrastructure into the cloud. With this move, they transfer some of their security, risk, and compliance responsibilities to cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Salesforce, to name a few.

Azure Policies help to govern a business's environment; it allows an organization to make sure that their hosted resources in the cloud are compliant with their organization's rules and service level agreements (SLAs). There are several ways that organizations can create Azure policies; they can customize Azure policies to the business needs, use the standard Azure Policy built-in policy definitions, or a combination of both.

Description

In this course, the instructor, Toddy Mladenov, goes into detail about Azure Policies and how you use these policies to govern your IT resources. This course takes roughly 1 hour and 7 minutes to complete, and each module is less than 30 minutes long. Once you have completed this course in its entirety, you will receive a certificate of completion along with 1 CEU/CPE.

Upon completion of this course, the student should have an understanding of:

• What Azure Policy and Initiatives are.
• How to create and manage Azure Policies and Initiatives.
• How to assign Azure Policies using the Portal and CLI.
• How to create custom Azure Policies.

Target Audience

Anyone who has an interest in learning more about Azure policies should take this course. This course benefits those who serve in or are seeking to fill the roles below:

• IT Auditors
• Compliance Managers
• Cloud Security Architects
• Cloud Security Engineers

Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of cloud computing.
• Familiarity with Azure and Azure services.
• Familiarity with JSON.
• Understanding of IT governance and compliance.

Course Outline

In module 2, you get an overview of what Azure policy and Azure initiative are. You will also learn the process of implementing Azure policies. Listed below is an outline of each lesson in this module:

• What is Azure Policy?
• Policy Definitions, Assignments, and Parameters.
• What is Azure Initiative?

In module 3, you learn how to create and assign Azure policies. Listed below is an outline of each lesson in this module:

• Standard Azure Policies.
• Create and manage Azure policy in Azure Portal.
• Create and manage Azure policy using Azure CLI.
• Create and manage Azure initiative in Azure Portal.
• Policy compliance and exemptions.

In module 4, you learn how to create custom policies in Azure. Listed below is an outline of each lesson in this module:

• Preparing the authoring environment
• Creating a custom policy in VS Code
• Azure key vault organization
• Retrieving compliance data

Below are some tutorials you can use to solidify your understanding of Azure Policy:

• Assign a policy using Azure Portal.
• Assign a policy using Azure CLI.
• Use VS Code to search and view Azure policies and assignments.
• Create a custom policy definition.

Cybrary's Azure Policies course is a great course to take if you want a better understanding of the difference between Azure policy and Azure initiative. If you are beginning to work with Azure policies and are unsure of where to start, this course is for you. If you need a refresher on creating, assigning, and managing Azure policies, this course is for you. This course helps you understand what it takes to govern and comply with your organization's rules and service level agreements in the Azure cloud.