A constantly growing business environment also increases the challenges for a complex Azure environment. Managing cloud resources efficiently while ensuring security, governance, and secure development practices becomes increasingly challenging. To stay ahead, taking a step back and restructuring the cloud setup—focusing on automation, scalability, and security-driven development, and following industry standards and best practices—is necessary. SecWise, cybersecurity partner for medium and large businesses, applies a complete transformation of its internal Azure cloud tenant.

Identifying the challenges

With an expanding cloud environment, inconsistencies in resource deployment make management increasingly complex. Ensuring security and governance across multiple environments becomes more difficult, and a reliance on manual configurations increases the risk of errors and inefficiencies. To address these issues, aligning the approach with industry standards such as Microsoft’s Well-Architected Framework and Azure landing zone best practices ensures a structured, automated, and secure cloud environment.

Automating deployments for consistency and control

To bring structure and consistency to its cloud operations, SecWise automates its deployment process. By translating infrastructure requirements into reusable templates, every environment is deployed in a predictable and secure manner. This approach not only ensures full version control through its DevOps platform, but also embeds security and compliance checks into the development pipeline. Following Microsoft’s Well-Architected Framework, SecWise improves reliability and operational excellence while reducing the risk of manual error. Automation of these processes embeds security from the start, enabling faster, more controlled deployments without compromising governance.

Transitioning to a hub-spoke architecture

To further enhance security and governance, SecWise moves to a hub-spoke model. The hub serves as a centralized location for security, identity, and monitoring services, while the spokes house individual applications in isolated yet connected environments. This model, aligned with Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework, provides better control over network traffic, strengthens security policies, and simplifies resource management—all while ensuring infrastructure changes are managed systematically and securely.

Restructuring subscriptions for efficiency

A clear subscription structure is essential to improving governance and cost management. It is important to reclassify subscriptions into dedicated environments, following Microsoft’s landing zone principles: Platform for core security and management services, Landing Zones for development, testing, and production, and Sandbox & Decommissioned for experimentation and retired workloads. By integrating automation and lifecycle management, waste is reduced, costs are optimized, and a cleaner, more controlled cloud environment is maintained.

The impact of these changes

This transformation delivers significant benefits. Security becomes more structured with policy enforcement and access control. Operational efficiency improves as automation reduces manual tasks and deployment inconsistencies. Costs are optimized through better resource utilization and proactive management, while the new architecture provides the scalability needed to support future growth. By embedding security into every step of the development and deployment processes, governance strengthens without slowing down innovation.

Key takeaways for your business 

Managing a growing cloud environment can be complex, but following best practices makes all the difference. By leveraging automation, embedding security from the start, and optimizing cloud architecture, organizations enhance security, reduce complexity and scale effectively.

Ready to optimize your cloud?

At SecWise, we specialize in building secure, efficient, and automated cloud environments. If you’re looking to enhance your Azure setup while ensuring security and agility, contact us today to learn how we can help.