Azure.

Where Azure fits on a long engagement.

Azure work is disproportionately identity work. Entra ID sits under everything, and getting groups, roles and conditional access right determines both security posture and how much friction people meet daily. It is also the part most likely to have been configured once and never revisited.

Hybrid is the other defining feature. Many Azure estates are genuinely half on-premises, and the interesting problems are at the boundary: networking, name resolution, and a migration that has been three-quarters finished for two years. Pretending that boundary is temporary is how it becomes permanent.

What an assigned team does with Azure.

Azure estates are usually half-migrated, and the half that remains is the difficult half. Treating that boundary as temporary is how it survives another three years; treating it as a permanent architecture until proven otherwise produces better decisions about where to invest.

Identity work underpins everything else and is rarely anybody's explicit job. On an assigned team it sits with platform capacity, commonly alongside .NET application work under outsource software development services on one agreement.

What we use Azure for.

• Finishing a stalled migration The remaining workloads moved or explicitly accepted as staying, so the dual estate stops being an accident.
• Identity and access review Roles and conditional access brought back in line with how the organisation actually works now.
• Governance that holds Policy, tagging and budgets applied so the estate stops accumulating untracked resources.

How Azure capacity is assigned.

Azure work is assigned under DevOps as a service, alongside .NET capacity on the same agreement where the application and the platform are the same problem.