What is Azure Policy?

Azure Policy is a service for creating, assigning, and enforcing governance rules across Azure resources. It evaluates resources for compliance with organizational standards and regulations. Policies can: Audit: identify non-compliant resources without blocking them. Deny: prevent creation of non-compliant resources (e.g., deny VM creation outside approved regions). Deploy if not exists: auto-remediate — add a monitoring agent to any VM that does not already have one. Modify: add or change resource properties (e.g., enforce required tags on creation). Policy Initiatives: group multiple related policies. Policies can be assigned at management group, subscription, or resource group scope. Azure provides built-in policies; you can also create custom ones in JSON. Policy is how enterprises enforce compliance at scale across thousands of resources.