Governing an Azure Virtual Desktop environment

The Cloud Adoption Framework provides a methodology to systematically and incrementally improve governance of your cloud portfolio. This article demonstrates how you can extend your governance approach to Azure Virtual Desktop environments deployed to Azure.

Initial governance foundation

Governance starts with an initial governance foundation often referred to as a governance MVP. This foundation deploys the basic Azure products required to deliver governance across your cloud environment.

The initial governance foundation focuses on the following aspects of governance:

• Basic hybrid network and connectivity.
• Azure role-based access control (RBAC) for identity and access control.
• Naming and tagging standards for consistent identification of resources.
• Organization of resources using resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups.
• Azure Policy and Azure Blueprints to enforce governance policies.

Expanding on governance disciplines

For Azure Virtual Desktop, the baseline needs to expand to include controls for functions specific to virtual desktops:

• User device used to access the virtual desktop
• Application security
• Session host OS
• Deployment configuration

Security baseline

The following guides provide best practices for implementing security controls for Azure Virtual Desktop environments:

• Azure Virtual Desktop security baseline.

• Azure Virtual Desktop security guide: best practices.