Azure Policy is Microsoft Azure’s governance service for defining and enforcing standards across cloud resources. Administrators write policies that require or deny specific settings, such as approved locations, allowed VM sizes, encryption, tagging, or network configurations. Policies can also audit resources and report when something drifts from the expected baseline.
In cyber security, Azure Policy matters because many attacks exploit misconfiguration rather than software bugs. A permissive storage account, an exposed service, or an unmanaged identity setting can create an easy path for data theft or privilege abuse. Policy helps defenders prevent that drift at scale, especially in large subscriptions where manual review is unreliable. It is not a detection tool by itself, but it complements scanners and posture-management platforms by turning security rules into enforceable controls. In practice, strong Azure defenses use policy to keep resources compliant before attackers can take advantage of weak defaults.