Simplifying the deployment of policies using initiatives

In more advanced scenarios where you consider governance and compliance regarding cloud environments, you’ll have to deploy tens of different policies. Some of these will be required by your organization; others may be enforced by external auditors. The problem with such a setup is that it requires lots of manual work or a complex automation system that can deploy those policies in the correct order and at an acceptable time. To overcome that challenge, Azure offers the concept of initiatives, which is several policies grouped as a single unit of deployment. In this section, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of this solution.

The idea behind initiatives

Let’s consider the following scenario – you have a bunch of policies that relate to Azure Storage. Some of them enforce certain configurations (HTTPS, disable access keys, enforce network rules, and so on), and some are used for auditing. You...