Azure Management Groups

Introduction

• Azure Management Groups are a feature in Microsoft Azure that allow you to efficiently manage access, policy, and compliance across multiple Azure subscriptions.
• They provide a hierarchical structure for organizing your Azure resources, making it easier to apply governance at scale.

Key Features of Azure Management Groups

1. Hierarchy and Organization:
   • Management groups allow you to create a hierarchy that can be up to six levels deep (excluding the root level).
   • This structure enables you to organize your subscriptions in a way that reflects your organization’s structure, such as by department, team, or project.
2. Policy and Compliance Management:
   • You can assign Azure Policies, Azure Blueprints, and role-based access control (RBAC) roles at the management group level.
   • These assignments are inherited by all subscriptions and resources within the management group, ensuring consistent policy enforcement and access control across your organization.
3. Root Management Group:
   • Every directory (tenant) has a single root management group that encompasses all other management groups and subscriptions.
   • This root management group can be used to apply global policies and access controls across the entire directory.
4. Scalability:
   • Management groups are designed to handle large-scale environments, allowing you to manage thousands of subscriptions under a single management group hierarchy.
5. Access Control:
   • You can assign RBAC roles at the management group level to control who can manage the management groups, apply policies, or view resources within the hierarchy.
6. Inheritance:
   • Policies and RBAC assignments made at a higher level in the hierarchy are inherited by lower levels.
   • This makes it easy to enforce organization-wide standards and governance.

Common Scenarios for Using Management Groups

1. Enterprise-Wide Governance:
   • Apply company-wide security policies and access controls from a central point.
   • For example, enforce a policy that requires all resources to have certain tags or restrict the creation of specific resource types.
2. Departmental Segmentation:
   • Organize subscriptions by department and apply specific policies or access controls that are relevant to each department.
   • For example, the finance department might have stricter compliance policies than the development department.
3. Project-Based Organization:
   • Group subscriptions by project to apply project-specific governance.
   • This can be useful in large organizations where different projects have different requirements and compliance standards.
4. Global Policy Enforcement:
   • Use the root management group to apply global policies that all other management groups and subscriptions must comply with.
   • For example, enforce secure transfer for all storage accounts or enable monitoring and diagnostics across all resources.

Example Hierarchy

• Consider an organization with multiple departments and projects. The hierarchy might look like this:

    Root Management Group
    │
    ├── DepartmentA
    │   ├── Project1
    │   └── Project2
    │
    ├── DepartmentB
    │   ├── Project3
    │   └── Project4
    │
    └── SharedServices
        ├── IT
        └── HR
  

• In this hierarchy:

  • Global policies and access controls can be applied at the Root Management Group level.
  • Department-specific policies can be applied at the DepartmentA and DepartmentB levels.
  • Project-specific policies and access controls can be applied to individual projects like Project1 and Project3.
  • Shared services like IT and HR can have their own management groups with relevant policies.

Benefits of Using Management Groups

1. Centralized Management: Simplifies the management of policies, access controls, and compliance across multiple subscriptions.
2. Consistency: Ensures consistent application of governance policies across all resources and subscriptions.
3. Flexibility: Allows for tailored policies and access controls at different levels of the organization’s structure.
4. Efficiency: Reduces the administrative overhead of managing individual subscriptions by allowing bulk policy application and access control assignment.