Security, governance and manageability

The last pair of cloud benefits is security and governance, and manageability.

Security

In the cloud, you choose how much security you manage yourself:

• With IaaS, you get the most control over security, including the operating system and the software you install.
• With PaaS and SaaS, much of the patching and maintenance is handled for you.

Cloud providers are also very good at the things that are hard for most organisations alone: physical security, protection against huge network attacks (DDoS), and security expertise at scale.

Governance and compliance

Governance means making sure your resources follow your organisation's rules and the regulations you are subject to. The cloud helps by letting you define standards once and apply them everywhere:

• deploy resources from approved templates so every deployment meets the standard,
• detect and fix resources that drift out of compliance,
• prove compliance with Microsoft's audit reports.

You will meet the tools for this, Azure Policy, resource locks and Microsoft Purview, in the governance module.

Manageability

There are two sides to manageability in the cloud:

Management of the cloud is about managing your resources:

• automatically scaling to meet demand,
• deploying from preconfigured templates,
• monitoring health and replacing failing resources automatically,
• getting alerts from metrics.

Management in the cloud is about how you manage them:

• through the web portal,
• with a command line (Azure CLI or PowerShell),
• through APIs.