What is Azure Policy and how does it support governance?

Azure Policy is an Azure governance service that allows organizations to define, enforce, and audit rules for Azure resources. For example, an organization may require: Specific Azure regions Required resource tags Approved resource types Encryption configurations Specific SKUs Security-related settings Azure Policy evaluates resources against defined policies and can report non-compliant resources. Depending on the policy effect, it can also prevent certain deployments or automatically modify resource configurations where appropriate. A simplified governance model is: Policy Definition → Assignment → Evaluation → Compliance Reporting → Remediation Azure Policy is especially valuable in large environments where hundreds or thousands of resources are deployed across multiple subscriptions. It can help enforce organizational standards without requiring administrators to manually inspect every resource. However, policy should be designed carefully. Overly restrictive policies can block legitimate workloads, while poorly designed policies may create compliance gaps. Azure Policy is often used alongside: Azure Management Groups Azure RBAC Microsoft Defender for Cloud Azure Blueprints-related governance approaches Resource Locks Cost Management Azure Policy provides the guardrails that help organizations maintain consistent, secure, and compliant Azure environments at scale.