Understanding Azure Policy: The Difference Between Policy and Initiative

As more and more organizations move their infrastructure to the cloud, managing and governing resources becomes increasingly important. Azure Policy is a powerful tool that allows organizations to enforce policies across their Azure environment, ensuring compliance with organizational standards, regulatory requirements, and security best practices.

Azure Policy is a service in Azure that enables you to create, assign, and manage policies that enforce rules and effects for your resources. Policies can enforce requirements such as resource types, tags, naming conventions, or other requirements that are unique to your organization. By using Azure Policy, you can ensure that all resources deployed in Azure are compliant with your organization’s policies.

Azure Policy is based on the JSON language and allows you to create policies using the Azure Policy portal, Azure PowerShell, or Azure CLI. Policies are defined using a set of rules and actions. A rule defines the conditions that resources must meet to be compliant with the policy, and an action specifies what should happen if a resource does not meet the policy conditions.

One of the most powerful features of Azure Policy is the ability to assign policies to specific resources or resource groups. When a policy is assigned to a resource, Azure Policy will evaluate the resource against the policy rules and take the specified action if the resource is non-compliant. Policies can also be…