Azure Security Architecture Blueprint
Reference architecture for secure Azure landing zones including network segmentation, identity, and governance patterns.
Cloud architects and security engineers designing or reviewing Azure landing zones.
A reference architecture you can adapt rather than build from scratch. Covers the management group hierarchy, landing zone topology, network hub design, identity boundary, and the non-negotiable guardrails every subscription should inherit.
Management group hierarchy
Root → Platform (connectivity, identity, management) and Landing Zones (corp, online, sandbox, decommissioned). Policies and RBAC attach at the level that gives the widest useful coverage — baseline at root, prod-specific at corp, relaxed at sandbox.
Network topology
- Hub-spoke with a single hub per region (Azure Firewall Premium or NVA)
- Spoke VNets peered to hub — no direct spoke-to-spoke peering
- Private DNS zones linked to hub, resolved centrally
- ExpressRoute or S2S VPN terminated in the hub only
- All spoke egress forced through the firewall via UDR
- Private Endpoints for all PaaS — no public endpoints in production
Identity boundary
- Separate privileged access workstation (PAW) path for break-glass and tenant admin roles
- Dedicated Entra tenant for production workloads (avoid using dev tenant for prod)
- All app registrations use certificates or federated credentials — no client secrets
- Managed identities for all Azure resource-to-resource auth
- Conditional Access baseline (block legacy auth, require MFA, compliant device for privileged)
Baseline policy initiative
- Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB) initiative assigned at root
- Deny public IPs on VMs in production
- Require HTTPS on Storage and disable anonymous access
- Enforce TLS 1.2 minimum everywhere
- Require tags: environment, owner, cost-centre, data-classification
- Deny resource deployment outside approved regions
Logging & monitoring
- Single Log Analytics workspace for Sentinel (central) with data connectors for all subscriptions
- Activity logs forwarded from all subscriptions via diagnostic settings
- Defender for Cloud at Standard tier on all subscriptions (pick plans per workload)
- Sentinel workbooks for identity, network, and workload dashboards
Change control
Infrastructure is delivered via IaC (Bicep or Terraform) from a Git repository with pull-request review, policy-check CI, and pipeline deployment. Manual portal changes are treated as incidents, not business-as-usual.
CyberZonic runs engagements that turn material like this into evidence.
If you need help scoping the work, turning this into a project plan, or running the assessment itself, get in touch.