Azure review checklist

Governance and management structure

Check management groups, policy inheritance, tagging discipline, budget coverage, and baseline guardrails. Governance issues are often the clearest signal that platform maturity is uneven.

Security and platform controls

Assess Defender coverage, security contacts, identity controls, and exposure patterns like public access or missing private connectivity expectations.

Resilience and operations

Look for backup coverage, diagnostics, Log Analytics usage, alerting, and monitoring discipline. These areas tend to separate operationally mature estates from fragile ones.