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Azure Management Guide: Before you start

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Before you start

There are many elements of management that need to be addressed before you define your management strategy. First, it's important to align with your strategy. As you began your cloud journey, you defined some critical outcomes for your business. These outcomes ranged from fiscal goals to operations, sustainability, security, and compliance. As you build your management baseline, ensure that these outcomes are incorporated and addressed. Connecting your management and operations to your strategy and plan will ensure that you have full alignment and accountability across your organization. See the section that covers business outcomes.

The Azure Management Guide helps Azure customers create a management baseline to establish resource consistency across Azure. This guide outlines the basic tools needed for any Azure production environments, especially environments that host sensitive data. For more information, best practices, and considerations related to preparing your cloud environment, see the readiness section of the Cloud Adoption Framework.

Scope of this guide

This guide teaches you how to establish tooling for a management baseline. It also outlines ways to extend the baseline or build resiliency beyond the baseline.

  • Inventory and visibility: Create an inventory of assets across multiple clouds. Develop visibility into the run state of each asset.
  • Operational compliance: Establish controls and processes to ensure each state is properly configured and running in a well-governed environment.
  • Protect and recover: Ensure all managed assets are protected and can be recovered using baseline management tooling.
  • Enhanced baseline options: Evaluate common additions to the baseline that might meet business needs.
  • Platform operations: Extend the management baseline with a well-defined service catalog and centrally managed platforms.
  • Workload operations: Extend the management baseline to include a focus on mission-critical workloads.

Management baseline

A management baseline is the minimum set of tools and processes that should be applied to every asset in an environment. Several additional options can be included in the management baseline. The next few articles accelerate cloud management capabilities by focusing on the minimum options necessary instead of on all of the available options.

The next step is Inventory and visibility.

This guide provides interactive steps that let you try features as they're introduced. To come back to where you left off, use the breadcrumb for navigation.