For many organisations, compliance is often seen as an obligatory, sometimes tedious, process to meet regulatory requirements. When done right, however, especially in a cloud-native environment like Microsoft Azure, compliance becomes a catalyst for improving the overall security posture.
This article outlines how leveraging Azure’s built-in compliance tools and frameworks can help organisations achieve both governance and enhanced protection across their entire cloud footprint.
Compliance and Security: Two Sides of the Same Coin
While security focuses on protecting systems from threats, compliance ensures that systems follow industry and regulatory standards. In Azure, the two are deeply interconnected: many compliance features directly enforce or improve security best practices.
Azure Policy
A perfect example of how Compliance and Security go hand in hand is Azure Policy. It is one of the most powerful yet often underutilised tools in Microsoft Azure’s arsenal, purpose-built to help organisations maintain this balance with precision and confidence.
At its core, Azure Policy is a governance engine that allows you to define and enforce rules across your Azure environment. These rules, can restrict or audit resources based on defined conditions, such as ensuring specific tags are applied, enforcing region restrictions, or requiring encryption on storage accounts. This means you can codify your organisation’s standards and ensure they are consistently applied, regardless of who is deploying resources. This is especially useful when you are working with independent teams that are managing their own Azure resources. Azure Policy allows you to define, audit and enforce specific configuration requirements for resources.
To get started with Azure Policy, either use the built-in initiatives provided by Microsoft, create custom policy definitions or use an open-source tool such as AzPolicyAdvertizer. Start by assessing your company’s policy and compliance needs; this will result in a clear overview of what is required. Then map the requirements to either custom or Built-in compliance initiatives.
Azure Policy is a foundational element of a secure, scalable, and accountable cloud architecture. When used thoughtfully, it transforms governance from a manual bottleneck into an automated, dynamic force that empowers teams to innovate within clearly defined guardrails. As cloud environments grow in complexity, the organisations that embrace tools like Azure Policy will be the ones that scale securely and sustainably.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud – Security Standards
Compliance in the cloud requires building a proactive, adaptable security posture that aligns with industry expectations and internal governance goals. These standards serve as a central blueprint for how organisations can not only detect risk but also measure and enforce compliance across Azure and hybrid environments.
Defender for Cloud Security Standards are mapped to widely recognised regulatory, Regional and Sector -and security frameworks, such as ISO 27001, NIST SP 800-53, PCI-DSS, and the Azure-specific Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark. By selecting and enabling these standards in Defender for Cloud, organisations gain immediate access to curated sets of recommendations that align with the controls in each standard. These recommendations are continuously evaluated against your deployed resources, creating a real-time view into your compliance state.
This, in turn, reduces manual work for auditors or internal compliance managers, as the Security Standards provide a ‘real-time’ overview of all Cloud resources. The Security Standards Initiatives can be extended to on-premises resources or other Public Clouds such as AWS or GCP via Azure Arc.
Automated Logging and Alerting
Many Regulatory Standards, such as ISO27001, GDPR and NIS2 require thorough logging, monitoring and alerting to ensure that all actions which are taken in the environment can be accessed or reviewed by the necessary people when applicable. The ability to generate, retain, and act upon log data is more than a best practice; it has become a requirement.
Azure Activity Logs and Azure Resource Logs serve as foundational data sources. Activity Logs capture operations performed on resources via the control plane while Resource Logs provide more granular, data plane-level insights from services like Key Vault, Storage, and Azure SQL. To meet compliance standards, these logs must not only be enabled but also retained for an appropriate duration, often 90 days to 7 years , depending on the standard. These retention requirements can be enforced by Azure Policy, to ensure that all logs are retained for the required duration.
Centralising these logs is essential. Azure Monitor and Log Analytics allow you to collect and store logs at scale. From there, you can query logs for audit trails, anomaly detection, or incident investigation. For long-term retention and immutable storage, logs can be exported to an Azure Storage account with immutable blob storage (WORM) or sent to a SIEM like Microsoft Sentinel. In Microsoft Sentinel, they can be used as a data source for a Security Operations Centre (SOC).
Virtual Machine Compliance
Configuration Management
Azure Configuration Management with DSCv3 ensures that every virtual machine adheres to a centrally defined configuration baseline, providing a verifiable record of compliance with standards such as PCI‑DSS and ISO 27001. By continuously detecting and correcting drift, it guarantees that security controls such as patch levels, service settings, and registry values remain intact across your entire VM estate.
Deployment via Azure Policy results in built‑in reporting that captures configuration status and remediation history, creating an audit‑ready trail that simplifies regulatory reviews and reduces the risk of non‑compliance.
Patch management
Keeping systems up to date with security patches is fundamental to maintaining a secure and compliant environment. Regulatory standards such as NIST and PCI-DSS explicitly require consistent patching of operating systems and applications.
Azure Update Manager enables centralised patch management for Azure and hybrid Virtual Machines, allowing you to schedule, monitor, and report on update deployment. Coupled with Azure Policy and Defender for Cloud, you can identify missing patches, enforce baselines, and trigger alerts when systems drift from compliance. All this is managed for our clients in the Azure Managed Service, ensuring that our clients’ virtual machines have the latest security patches.
Backup management
Reliable backups are a core compliance requirement in most regulatory frameworks, ensuring data availability and recoverability in case of failure, corruption, or attack. Azure Backup provides a centralised, policy-driven solution for safeguarding virtual machines. By automating daily snapshots and enforcing retention policies aligned with standards like ISO 27001 or HIPAA, organisations demonstrate that critical systems are resilient and recoverable.
Azure Recovery Services Vault are encrypted by default with Microsoft Managed Keys. When more control is required, Customer Managed Keys can be used as an additional security mechanism. Furthermore, backups can be geo-redundantly stored to recover from Regional outages. Lastly, the Recovery Services Vaults can be locked down with Multi-user authorisation, Soft delete and immutability
Conclusion
In today’s IT landscape, compliance is more than a regulatory necessity, it’s a strategic asset. When leveraged effectively, especially in a cloud-native platform like Microsoft Azure, compliance becomes a driver of security, operational efficiency, and business resilience.
In this article, we highlighted how Azure’s built-in tools, such as Azure Policy, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and automated compliance frameworks, enable organisations to enforce governance at scale, reduce risk, and streamline audit readiness. These capabilities not only ensure adherence to global standards but also provide real-time visibility and control across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Are you planning to implement the topics mentioned in the article, but are not sure where to start? At The Collective, we help organisations harness Microsoft Azure’s compliance capabilities to unlock both security and business value. Get in touch to see how we can support your journey.