Azure Governance – Get Practical

Azure Health Check – A Free Script to Audit and Visualise Cloud Hygiene

Are you running Azure subscriptions and want a quick, human-friendly overview of your governance, compute, storage, network and Key Vault hygiene?
The Azure Health Check PowerShell script gives you exactly that — scanning multiple subscriptions, flagging weak spots, and producing a clean interactive HTML report (with charts!).

Why this matters

Large and growing Azure estates can easily drift into insecure or unsupported configurations: unprotected VMs, public storage blobs, missing resource locks, orphaned disks, exposed network ports — all of which can lead to security, availability or compliance issues.

Yet manually auditing each subscription is time-consuming. That’s where automation helps. With this script, you get a multi-subscription health summary, scored, visualised and exportable — ideal for periodic reviews, customer readiness checks, or even compliance audits.

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Azure Resource Locks – The One Feature You’re Probably Not Using (But Should Be)

Accidental deletion or modification of critical resources in Azure is more common than most teams would like to admit. And unlike on-prem environments, where layers of approvals or access barriers might slow someone down, Azure’s agility can sometimes be its own worst enemy — especially when production workloads are one click away from disappearing.

Enter: Azure Resource Locks — your environment’s seatbelt.

What Are Azure Resource Locks?

Azure Resource Locks are a built-in feature that allow you to restrict operations on resources, resource groups, or subscriptions. These locks act as a last line of defense — even if someone has Contributor or Owner permissions, a lock will block unwanted actions like deletion or configuration changes.

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How to Use Azure Policy for Better Cloud Management

When you work in the cloud, keeping things organised is very important. Azure Policy is a simple tool that helps enforce rules on your resources. In this post, I’ll explain what Azure Policy is and show you a basic example of using it to require a tag on all your resources.

What is Azure Policy?

Azure Policy lets you set rules for your cloud resources. For example, you might want every resource to have a tag called Cost Centre so you know which department it belongs to. If someone tries to create a resource without that tag, the policy can stop it from being created.

This tool is very useful because it helps everyone on your team follow the same guidelines and keeps your cloud resources well organised.

A Simple Example: Requiring a "Cost Centre" Tag

In this example, we’ll create a custom policy that requires every resource to have a Cost Centre tag. If the tag is missing, the resource won’t be allowed.

Overview of the Steps

Create the policy rule file.
Create the policy parameters file.
Create the policy definition in Azure using the Azure CLI.
Assign the policy to a scope.
Check if your policy is working.

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