Microsoft Azure Cloud Development for Regulated US and EU Workloads

Neither is universally better. Azure is the natural choice when the client already uses Microsoft 365, Active Directory or Dynamics 365 — Entra ID federation, hybrid AD join and Azure Virtual Desktop integration are native. Azure also has the strongest HIPAA BAA language and broadest EU data residency coverage for regulated EU workloads. AWS has a larger service catalogue and more mature serverless ecosystem. We document the decision as an Architecture Decision Record based on existing tooling, regulatory requirements and team skills.

AKS for workloads that require custom Kubernetes operators, multi-tenant isolation at pod level, Helm chart portability or cross-cloud migration optionality. App Service for teams that want managed PaaS compute without Kubernetes operational overhead — autoscaling, deployment slots, TLS and VNet integration are handled by the platform. Azure Functions and Durable Functions suit event-driven and long-running orchestration workloads. Many architectures combine all three: App Service for the web tier, Functions for async processing, AKS for data-intensive microservices.

FinOps from the first sprint: Azure Cost Management budgets per subscription with Teams alerts, Reserved Instances for AKS system node pools and Azure SQL (1-year minimum for 30-40% savings), Azure Advisor rightsizing recommendations reviewed monthly, Blob Storage lifecycle tiers (Hot/Cool/Archive) with policy automation, and tag enforcement at subscription scope so every cost is allocated to a team or product. We set up a FinOps review cadence in the engagement kickoff, not as an afterthought.

Microsoft signs a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement covering Azure's eligible services. We implement: PHI encrypted at rest using customer-managed keys in Azure Key Vault (AES-256), TLS 1.2+ for all data in transit, audit logging via Azure Monitor Diagnostic Settings with immutable retention, Azure SQL Always Encrypted for PHI columns, network isolation through private endpoints and VNet integration, and Defender for Cloud continuous assessment. We produce a HIPAA compliance matrix mapping controls to Azure service configuration for each engagement.

We enforce EU data residency at the Azure Policy level: a deny policy at management group scope blocks resource creation outside approved EU regions (West Europe, North Europe, Germany West Central). Terraform variable sets reference region variables that resolve to EU-only values for EU subscriptions. Cosmos DB and Azure SQL geo-replication targets are restricted to the same EU region set. Data residency is tested in CI — any Terraform plan that would place resources outside the approved region list fails the pipeline before it reaches production.

A landing zone is a pre-configured Azure environment — management group hierarchy, subscription structure, Azure Policy assignments, networking baseline and centralised logging — that new workloads deploy into rather than building from scratch. Without one, each project makes independent infrastructure decisions, compliance controls are inconsistent, and audit remediation is manual. We deliver an opinionated landing zone in Bicep or Terraform in the first two weeks of an engagement, sized for your current workload count with room to grow.

Yes. For on-premises migrations we use Azure Migrate for discovery and assessment, Azure Database Migration Service for SQL Server and PostgreSQL workloads, and Azure Site Recovery for VM lift-and-shift. For AWS-to-Azure migrations we replatform containerised workloads from EKS to AKS, migrate RDS to Azure SQL or Cosmos DB, and replace Lambda with Azure Functions where appropriate. Typical timeline: 2 weeks discovery, 4 weeks proof-of-concept, 8-16 weeks production migration depending on workload count and complexity.