10 Optimizations for Your Azure Environment – Part 2

As we enter the new year, I’d like to challenge every company with an Azure environment to “do more with less” by raising the operational maturity of their cloud environment.  Successful companies look at the cloud as a financial advantage to their businesses because of the opportunity to apply optimizations across each spending area.  The unsuccessful companies deploy services and are ineffective at applying spend to improvement, likely leaving it as they initially provisioned it.   

Part 2 of this series outlines the second five ways to optimize your Azure environment.

Number 6: Implement a consistent and detailed tagging structure that is representative of organizational policy goals

A few things to remember here:

• Implement consistent resource naming.  I suggest using the Azure Resource Naming Tool
• Implement best practice tagging, easily found in the CAF framework

Number 7: Define a single provisioning approach

Take the opportunity to optimize the provisioning approach by normalizing toward infrastructure-as-code as a deployment approach.  This should include limiting (if not disallowing completely) manual provisioning in favor of automated provisioning and tool-based deployment.  I typically only allow manual deployments in “playground environments”.  This can be most easily facilitated by structuring the subscriptions to easily box playgrounds into self-destructing parts of the infrastructure.

Number 8: Build management groups and subscription structures in a CAF-consistent approach using an Enterprise landing zone framework

The goal of this optimization is to build in a scalable and manageable way.  Too often I see these mistakes made in the building of an environment:

• Subscriptions without structure
• Management groups not implemented at all
• No policies beyond the base ones
• Everything in one subscription
• Subscriptions without clear functional control
• Security inconsistent across subscriptions

Here is the typical CAF consistent structure:

Number 9:  Define a clear backlog build around Cloud Governance & Adoption objectives

The key organizational activity is to build your environment in an intentional way you can measure and manage.  Think about these clear backlog categories:

Number 10: Optimize how organizational teams are structured

The final step is building organizational teams that are effective at doing what they need to do.  The goal is to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence and enable business teams that can best help the organization take advantage of the cloud.  Reference the Cloud Adoption Framework to best understand possible structures.

Here is a nice visual of a prospective organization for a Center of Excellence

This a reminder of the overall list of Top 10, please see more posts for detail, as well as the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and future presentations.

Click here for Part 1 of this blog series which covers the first five Azure Optimizations.