Azure Security Assessment Templates: A Practical Toolkit for Audits, Monitoring & Continuous Compliance
I’ve recently published a new GitHub repository—Azure Security Assessment Templates—that bundles practical templates, checklists, policies, and automation to help teams assess and strengthen Azure environments. It’s designed for real projects: clear structure, fast onboarding, and opinionated defaults that align with common frameworks like ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2, plus Azure best practices.
Browse the repository on GitHub ·
Quick-Start ·
Architecture ·
Sentinel docs
What is it and who is it for?
This collection gives security, cloud, and DevOps teams a ready-to-use foundation for Azure security assessments and continuous monitoring. If you regularly prepare for audits, need consistent evidence, or want to standardize your Azure security workflows, this is for you.
Highlights at a glance
- Enterprise-grade coverage: a structured, multi-folder repository with templates for assessments, reporting, CI/CD, policy as code, and Azure Sentinel (Microsoft Sentinel) content.
- Compliance alignment: mappings and templates for ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2, plus Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark alignment in Best Practices.
- Automation-first: deployment scripts, policy baselines, CI/CD gates, and Sentinel content to get from “empty” to “monitored” quickly.
- Built for teams: role checklists, RACI, runbooks, and report scaffolding to drive a consistent assessment workflow end-to-end.
Repository structure (what you get)
The repo is organized so you can find the right artifact quickly:
- Assessment/ – plan, questionnaires, methodology, architecture review checklists, scoring model.
- Compliance/ – ISO 27001 and SOC 2 mappings, SoA and ISMS scope templates, evidence lists.
- Policies/ – Azure Policy definitions/initiatives and guidance to enforce controls by code.
- Sentinel/ – Microsoft Sentinel analytics rules, playbooks, data connectors, monitoring, and deployment artifacts.
- Pipelines/ – GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, and GitLab CI templates for security scanning and gates.
- Checklists/, Roles/, Runbooks/, Report/ – hand-offs for roles, operational procedures, and reporting templates.
- Standards/, BestPractices/ – internal standards and MCSB-aligned guidance.
- Scripts/ – quick deployment and helper scripts (e.g., baseline rollout).
Microsoft Sentinel (security monitoring)
The Sentinel section includes analytics rules (behavioral/ML-style patterns), threat scenarios, multi-cloud and Microsoft 365 data connectors, SOAR playbooks, monitoring baselines, investigation workbooks, parsers, and watchlists—plus infrastructure-as-code to deploy consistently across environments.
Recommended assessment workflow
- Planning – define scope, stakeholders, and the target framework (ISO 27001, SOC 2). Use the assessment plan and RACI templates.
- Discovery – send questionnaires, review architecture, run technical checks with role-specific lists.
- Implementation – deploy the baseline, enable policies, onboard Sentinel content, and wire CI/CD security gates.
- Validation – test controls, assess risk, collect evidence (registers, sampling plans, procedures).
- Reporting – compile findings, remediation plan, and the final report with exec summary.
Getting started (5 minutes)
Prereqs: Azure CLI, jq, an Azure subscription, and a Log Analytics workspace for Sentinel.
# Clone
git clone https://github.com/ilyafedotov-ops/Templates.git
cd Templates
# Deploy a baseline (example)
./Scripts/deploy-baseline.sh \
--resource-group "rg-security-assessment" \
--workspace "law-security-001" \
--location "westeurope"
Next steps: open the Policies/ and Sentinel/ folders for control coverage and detection content, and the Pipelines/ folder to add security scanning to CI/CD. The QUICK-START and ARCHITECTURE docs provide deeper guidance.
CI/CD security integration
The repository includes templates for GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, and GitLab CI to add policy checks, IaC/container scanning, SBOM generation, and code analysis to your pipelines. Start with the GitHub Actions workflows in .github/workflows/ or the pipeline templates under Pipelines/, and adapt them to your repos.
Common use cases
- Audit readiness: standardize evidence and mappings for recurring ISO/SOC audits.
- Greenfield setup: enforce a secure baseline in new subscriptions from day one.
- Continuous compliance: policy initiatives + Sentinel monitoring to keep drift in check.
- Consulting delivery: repeatable assessments with consistent reports and hand-offs.
Practical tips
- Run policy evaluations in a non-prod subscription first; enable remediation only after review.
- Parameterize environment differences (dev/stage/prod) rather than duplicating policy/queries.
- Keep CI pipelines fast: cache scanners and split long jobs; run deep scans on a schedule.
- Document exceptions with expiry dates; add Sentinel rules to watch those areas closely.
Contribute & feedback
Have ideas or gaps to close? Open an issue or send a PR. If this saves you time, please star the repo and share it with your team.
🔗 github.com/ilyafedotov-ops/Templates
Author: Ilya Fedotov — IT Infrastructure & Cloud Security Consultant