There’s a lot to keep up with when it comes to compliance.

With auditors asking hard questions about data residency, GDPR, and ISO controls, how confident are you in your answers?

If you’re running your business on Azure, compliance is a fundamental part of keeping your operations running smoothly and legally. Thankfully Azure has built compliance into its DNA, with tools and certifications that can actually make your life easier.

Below, we’ll go through everything you need to know about compliance in Azure, starting with the regulations that matter most to organisations like yours.

Compliance isn’t optional anymore. With GDPR fines reaching up to 4% of global annual turnover (we’re talking millions for many businesses), getting it wrong isn’t just embarrassing, but potentially business-ending. Companies can potentially be hit with seven-figure penalties for data breaches that might have been prevented with proper compliance measures.

Contrary to what some think, Azure actually makes compliance easier, not harder. Instead of building your own compliant infrastructure from scratch, you get to make use of Microsoft’s huge investments in security and compliance. They’ve already done the heavy lifting with certifications, audits, and controls. You just need to know how to use them properly.

The platform offers over 90 compliance certifications, more than any other cloud provider. Whether you’re in financial services dealing with FCA regulations, healthcare managing NHS data, or retail processing card payments, Azure has a compliance framework for it. And if you’re working with government agencies, Azure holds specific certifications for government cloud requirements, including UK G-Cloud and Official-Sensitive clearances, making it suitable for public sector workloads that demand additional security controls.

GDPR is still the heavyweight champion of compliance requirements for UK businesses, even now that we’re out of the EU. It affects how you collect, store, process, and delete personal data, and Azure has built-in features to help you meet every requirement.

Azure services come with GDPR compliance baked in. Your data stays in your chosen regions (UK South or UK West for most of us), and Microsoft acts as a data processor under clearly defined terms. They won’t move your data outside your specified geography unless you explicitly tell them to, which is really important for demonstrating data sovereignty to regulators.

The platform gives you the tools to handle data subject requests efficiently. Need to find all data relating to a specific individual for a GDPR request? Azure Purview can scan across your entire data estate. If you need to prove data deletion, Azure’s audit logs give you tamper-proof evidence. And with Microsoft’s EU Data Boundary initiative, your data processing stays within European borders, perfect for organisations with strict data residency requirements.

Best practices for GDPR in Azure start with encryption everywhere: at rest, in transit, and during processing. Use Azure Information Protection to classify and label sensitive data automatically. Enable Advanced Data Security on your SQL databases. And always maintain audit trails using Azure Monitor and Log Analytics.

Each part of Azure’s compliance range serves a specific purpose. Here’s what the main compliance tools do:

Azure Trust Center is your library of compliance documentation, certifications, and audit reports. It’s where you go to prove Azure meets specific standards, download compliance certificates, and access detailed information about Microsoft’s security and privacy practices. When auditors ask for evidence that Azure holds a particular certification, Trust Center provides the official documentation you need.

Azure Compliance Manager is your active compliance workspace, where the real work happens. Here you run assessments against regulatory standards and track your compliance score in real-time. You can also use it to generate evidence for auditors. It gives you actionable recommendations for improving your compliance posture, and helps you manage the documentation trail that regulators require. It’s your compliance hub where you actively monitor and improve your compliance status.

The Azure Compliance Centre (found as part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud) is different from Compliance Manager. While Compliance Manager helps you assess and track regulatory compliance, the Compliance Centre focuses on technical resource compliance with your internal policies. It shows which of your Azure resources comply with the policies you’ve set up, like “all storage must be encrypted” or “resources must have proper tags”. From here, you can see at a glance which resources are breaking your rules and need immediate attention.

Azure Policy deserves special mention too. It’s an automation powerhouse for compliance. Instead of manually checking whether resources meet your standards, Azure Policy continuously enforces them. If you want to make sure all storage accounts use encryption, you can create a policy for it. Need to prevent resources being created outside the UK? Policy handles that too.

The compliance administrator role in Azure gives designated team members the permissions they need to manage compliance without giving them the keys to the kingdom. They can run assessments, generate reports, and configure compliance settings without being able to modify actual resources. It’s perfect for separating compliance responsibilities from operational duties.

Azure can help you hit a range of different compliance targets. We’ll highlight some of the major standards you’ll probably want to comply with.

For UK and European businesses, these are the certifications that matter most:

• ISO 27001/27018 covers information security and protection of personal data in the cloud. Almost all Azure services have these certifications, making them your safe bet for any data processing.
• SOC 1/2/3 reports will demonstrate Azure’s operational controls. Your auditors will want to see these, especially SOC 2 Type II, which proves that controls work over time, not just at a point in time.
• Cyber Essentials Plus, the UK government-backed scheme, is all about protecting your business (and customer data) against cyber threats.

For specific industries, you might also need:

• Azure HIPAA compliance matters if you’re handling health data, even if you’re not directly in healthcare. Azure is capable of helping you with this.
• Azure PCI compliance is crucial for payment card processing. Azure provides a PCI DSS Level 1 service provider attestation (the highest level available).
• Azure NIST compliance frameworks are increasingly requested by enterprise clients, especially those with US operations. Azure maps to multiple NIST standards including the Cybersecurity Framework.

As for CCPA, if you’re processing California residents’ data, Azure helps you comply. But if you’re meeting GDPR requirements, you’re probably most of the way there.

Different Azure services have different compliance considerations. Let’s break down the key ones.

Azure AD compliance (now Entra ID, though the old name is still used a lot) is your foundation. It controls who can access what, making it super important for any compliance framework. Within Entra ID, you should enable multi-factor authentication everywhere, use Conditional Access policies, and regularly inspect everyone’s access rights. The compliance administrator role here can manage identity-related compliance without having global admin rights.

Azure OpenAI compliance is the new frontier. With AI regulations evolving really quickly, Azure OpenAI services are just about keeping up. They include built-in content filtering, abuse monitoring, and data processing agreements. Your prompts and completions should stay within your specified regions, and Microsoft doesn’t use your data to train their models: great for maintaining data confidentiality.

Azure DevOps compliance often gets overlooked but it’s where your code lives. Make sure to enable branch policies to enforce code reviews. You’ll also want to use Azure Artifacts for secure package management, and integrate security scanning into your pipelines. Policy as Code approaches can help you version-control your compliance requirements alongside your application code.

Azure device compliance works hand-in-hand with Conditional Access. You can require devices to be compliant with your security policies before they can access corporate resources (Microsoft Intune would be the service you’d use for this). This includes everything from requiring encryption to making sure the latest security updates are installed.

Best practices for maintaining compliance in Azure

Compliance, of course, is an ongoing process. Here’s how to keep your Azure environment compliant over time.

Start with continuous compliance monitoring using Microsoft Defender for Cloud (which has now taken over from Azure Security Center). It continuously assesses your resources against compliance standards and industry benchmarks, giving you a compliance score and specific recommendations for improvement. We’ve covered the difference between Defender and Sentinel – getting to grips with this should help you build the right security architecture for your compliance needs.

Azure Compliance Manager should become a familiar friend. Run regular assessments against your required standards and track your improvement actions. Generate Azure compliance reports that auditors actually want to see. The platform maintains evidence automatically, so when audit time comes, you’re not scrambling to find all the documentation you need.

Don’t forget about disaster recovery either. It’s not just about keeping systems running. Many compliance frameworks actually require you to show your resilience and recovery capabilities. Your disaster recovery plan needs to include compliance considerations like data residency during failover and maintaining audit trails during incidents.

Setting up automated responses to ‘compliance drift’ is really important, too. When Azure Policy detects non-compliant resources, it can automatically remediate them or prevent their creation entirely. This means your compliance activities won’t just be reactive firefighting – you’ll be proactively preventing issues.

Let’s look at how this might work with a fictional example. Imagine a UK financial services firm that needs to meet FCA operational resilience requirements while maintaining GDPR compliance. They’d start by enabling Compliance Manager assessments for both frameworks, discovering a significant overlap in controls.

Using Azure Policy, they’d enforce encryption on all storage accounts and databases. They’d configure geo-redundant backups that kept data within the UK. Azure Integration Services would help them maintain secure connections between their on-premises systems and Azure, making sure that data stayed encrypted in transit.

A sensible approach would be to phase the compliance journey over six months. Month one would focus on identity and access management. Month two would tackle data classification and protection. By month six, they’d have automated compliance checking and could generate audit reports in minutes rather than weeks.

The key is not trying to do everything at once. If you’re working on something similar, start with your highest-risk areas: usually identity and data protection. Build your compliance abilities gradually. Use Policy as Code to make compliance rules version-controlled and repeatable.

When planning your migration to Azure, build compliance requirements into your migration strategy from day one. It’s much easier to migrate into a compliant environment than to retrofit compliance later.

Compliance in Azure isn’t a mammoth task. If you’re early on in your ‘sorting things out’ project, there are a few practical steps you can start with.

First, head to Compliance Manager and run an assessment for your most critical compliance standard (probably GDPR if you’re a UK business). The assessment will show you exactly where you stand and what needs attention.

Enable Azure Policy for automated enforcement. Start with simple policies like requiring tags on all resources (great for cost optimisation and compliance tracking) before moving to more complex security policies.

Review your identity and access management. Ensure you have appropriate RBAC roles assigned, multi-factor authentication enabled, and regular access reviews scheduled.

Then think about your long-term compliance strategy. Are you building compliance into your DevOps processes? Are you using automation to maintain compliance over time? Are your teams trained on compliance requirements?

At Synextra, we specialise in helping UK businesses navigate the details of Azure, including compliance. Whether you’re starting from scratch or optimising an existing environment, we bring the human touch to every technical challenge. Contact us to find out more.