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Isolation and governance

Source: Azure Environment Standards, sys_kb_id=a507920d2b25c7941f16fc8bee91bfc4.


  • Production workloads run in dedicated subscriptions.
  • Non-production and production must NEVER share a subscription.

[TBD: the standard does not say whether each non-production tier needs its own subscription, or whether Sandbox, Dev, Test and Stage may share one between them.]

Control Requirement
Budgets Required at the subscription level.
Tagging Standard tagging on all resources.
Infrastructure All infrastructure via IaC.
Policy Enforced at the Management Group level.

[TBD: the required tag keys and allowed values are not enumerated in the Azure Environment Standards.]

The only tag requirement stated anywhere in the six standards is the data-classification tag on storage resources, from the Storage & Data standard (Public, Internal, Confidential, Restricted).

All infrastructure is deployed via IaC. Terraform is approved with no approval needed, but approved modules only (Approved Software standard). IaC scanning with Checkmarx is a required CI stage (CI/CD Pipeline Standards).

[TBD: the standard does not say whether Bicep or ARM templates are acceptable IaC alternatives to Terraform.]

Policy enforcement is at the Management Group level.

[TBD: the standard does not enumerate the required Azure Policy definitions or initiatives, nor the management group hierarchy.]

Exceptions are approved by the Business Owner (see roles-and-responsibilities.md).


Source of truth: plugins/patterson-engineering/skills/azure-environment-standards/references/isolation-and-governance.md in the patterson-corp repository.