Strategies for Segregation: Management Group and Subscription

 In Azure, management groups and subscriptions are key organizational structures that help you manage access, policies, and compliance across your Azure resources effectively. Strategically segregating these entities is crucial for maintaining a clear hierarchy, enforcing governance, and optimizing cost management. Here's how you can approach this segregation, including various criteria and reasoning behind these strategies:

Management Groups

Purpose: Management groups provide a level of abstraction above subscriptions, allowing you to efficiently manage access, policy, and compliance across multiple subscriptions.

Strategies for Segregation:

1. By Organizational Structure: Align management groups with your organizational structure (e.g., departments, business units). This helps in applying specific policies and access controls relevant to each unit’s needs.
• Example: Create separate management groups for HR, Finance, IT, and Development. This way, policies specific to development practices can be applied to the Development group without affecting Finance or HR.
2. By Environment: Segregate management groups based on the environment type, such as Development, Testing, Staging, and Production. This allows for environment-specific governance and access control.
• Example: Production environments may require stricter access controls and policies compared to Development environments.
3. By Geography or Region: If your organization operates in multiple geographical regions, creating management groups per region can help address region-specific compliance and data residency requirements.
• Example: Management groups for EU, US, and APAC can ensure that policies align with GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, and other local regulations.
4. By Compliance or Regulatory Needs: Organizations subject to various regulatory requirements might create management groups to enforce specific compliance controls across the affected subscriptions.
• Example: A management group for subscriptions holding PCI-DSS scoped resources could have policies enforcing encryption and audit logging.

Subscriptions

Purpose: Subscriptions act as containers for billing and resource management. Each subscription can have its policies, access controls, and limits.

Strategies for Segregation:

1. By Project or Application: Allocate a separate subscription for each major project or application. This facilitates granular access control and makes it easier to track costs per project.
• Example: A subscription for an e-commerce platform and another for a data analytics project allow for focused governance and budgeting.
2. By Lifecycle Stage: Similar to management groups, you can segregate subscriptions by the lifecycle stage of resources (development, test, production), especially when different stages have varying requirements.
• Example: A subscription for development resources might have more relaxed policies compared to the production subscription, which would be tightly controlled.
3. By Cost Center or Department: Allocate subscriptions according to cost centers or departments, aiding in budget allocation and cost management.
• Example: Assigning a subscription to the marketing department allows for clear visibility into the costs incurred by marketing initiatives and campaigns.
4. By Security Boundary Needs: In scenarios where resources have distinct security requirements, dedicating subscriptions to these resources helps in applying stringent access controls and monitoring.
• Example: Workloads that handle sensitive data, such as personal identifiable information (PII), might be isolated in a separate subscription with enhanced security measures.

General Considerations

• Management Overhead: While segregation provides clarity and tailored governance, it can also increase management complexity. Striking a balance between granularity and manageability is key.
• Policy Inheritance: Policies applied at higher levels (management groups) are inherited by the entities below them (subscriptions). Design your hierarchy to leverage policy inheritance effectively.
• Access Management: Use Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to define who has access to what within your management groups and subscriptions. Align this with your segregation strategy.

Segregating management groups and subscriptions in Azure requires a thoughtful approach that aligns with your organizational structure, operational requirements, and governance objectives. By carefully planning this structure, you can enhance security, streamline operations, and improve cost management across your Azure environment.