Azure Blueprint

                        Azure Blueprint

Ever wondered on how could anyone set up a compliance standards for the resources deployed in Microsoft Azure? In a fast moving industry where every small offerings by cloud provider keep on changing rapidly; it’s hard to keep the compliance-check up-to-date.

In order to address compliance standards, Microsoft recommend to use Azure Blueprint. It’s a free service that helps customer deploy and update cloud environments in a repeatable manner using composable artifacts such as policies, ARM templates and role based access controls (RBAC). Azure Blueprints is built to help customer’s setup governance strategy around their Azure environments and can also scale to support production/non-production implementations for large-scale migration environment.

In other words, Blueprints are a declarative way to orchestrate the deployment of various resource templates and other artifacts such as:

1. Role Assignments
2.  Policy Assignments
3. Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template
4. Resource Group

Microsoft Azure leads the industry with several compliance offerings that involves international and industry-specific compliance standards, such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI, SOC 1 and SOC 2, along with country-specific standards, including FedRAMP and other NIST 800-53 derived standards, Australia IRAP and Singapore MTCS.

Let’s see this with an example to understand better,

‘ISO 27001: Shared Services’ is a blueprint available under Azure tenant. Simply navigate to the Blueprints page, click “Create a Blueprint”, and choose ‘ISO 27001: Shared Services’ blueprint from the list.

We could also notice various other compliance offering by Microsoft as shown in below screenshot.

           

                                                    Figure 1: Create a Blueprint

‘ISO 27001: Shared Services’ blueprint is designed to help people deploy production-ready, secure end-to-end solutions in quick time and it includes:

·        Hardened infrastructure resources: Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are used to automatically deploy the components of the architecture into Azure by specifying configuration parameters during setup. The infrastructure components include Azure Firewall, Active Directory, Key Vault, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Virtual Networks with subnets, Network Security Groups, and Role Based Access Control definitions. Additionally, these resources can be locked by Blueprints as a security measure to protect the consistency of the defined blueprint and the environment it was designed to create.

·        Policy controls: It is a set of Azure policies that help provide real-time enforcement, compliance assessment, and remediation for the required environment.

·        Security and Compliance controls: A team can be benefitted from all the controls for which Microsoft is responsible as cloud provider, and blueprint helps to configure a number of the remaining controls to meet ISO 27001 requirements.

                                                           Figure 2: Artifacts

Lifecycle of an Azure Blueprint

Yes, Azure Blueprint is no different, it has a lifecycle as they are created and then deployed. And, when they are no longer needed, they are deleted. Azure Blueprints also provides support for CI/CD pipelines for organizations that manage infrastructure-as-code (IaC). Azure Blueprint lifecycle consists of,

1. Creation of Blueprint
2.  Publishing of Blueprint
3. Creating or editing a new version of Blueprint
4. Publishing a new version of Blueprint
5. Deletion of a specific version of Blueprint
6. Deleting the Blueprint altogether

I hope this article would give its readers a better understanding about the overview of Azure Blueprints. 

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For more details about Azure Blueprints, please see this link.