Introduction

  • 3 minutes

Your organization just approved 15 new AI projects across five business units. Each team wants to experiment with Azure OpenAI, deploy custom models, and spin up GPU clusters—all while your IT governance team scrambles to answer urgent questions: How do we prevent runaway costs? Who approved that production deployment without security review? Are we violating data residency requirements?

Microsoft Foundry addresses these challenges by providing a unified governance platform that enables rapid AI experimentation while maintaining enterprise controls. Instead of forcing teams to submit tickets and wait days for approvals, Foundry automates policy enforcement at the point of resource provisioning. Your developers get self-service access to preapproved AI services, while your governance team gains real-time visibility into compliance status and spending patterns across all AI workloads.

This module walks you through implementing Microsoft Foundry's governance framework in a realistic enterprise scenario. You configure policies that balance innovation velocity with security requirements, establish approval workflows that route high-risk requests to appropriate stakeholders, and build compliance dashboards that demonstrate regulatory adherence to auditors. By the end of this module, you have hands-on experience implementing the governance controls that Fortune 500 companies use to scale AI adoption responsibly.

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you're able to:

  • Configure Microsoft Foundry governance policies for AI resource provisioning
  • Implement compliance monitoring and reporting for AI infrastructure
  • Establish secure access controls and identity management for AI workloads
  • Evaluate governance metrics and optimize policy effectiveness

Prerequisites

Before starting this module, you should have:

  • Familiarity with Azure Policy and Azure Resource Manager concepts

  • Basic understanding of identity and access management with Microsoft Entra ID

  • Experience with cloud governance principles and compliance requirements