Microsoft Azure Architect Design (AZ-301) Practice Exam

Azure Policy is a service designed to help enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at scale. It achieves this primarily by defining and enforcing specific rules and effects over resources deployed in Azure. This means that you can create policies that not only determine what resources can be deployed but also their configurations and properties. For instance, a policy could enforce that all storage accounts must use a specific redundancy option or must reside in a certain location. By doing so, Azure Policy ensures that all resource deployments align with governance requirements and best practices set by the organization.

When policies are applied, Azure evaluates the existing resources and ensures compliance with the defined rules. If a deployed resource fails to comply with the policy, Azure can take action based on the defined effects, such as denying the creation of non-compliant resources, or auditing existing resources to identify those that do not align with organizational standards.

This proactive management and enforcement capability provided by Azure Policy is essential for maintaining compliance in complex cloud environments, thus ensuring that the organizational policies are followed consistently across all deployments.