How do teams isolate environments securely?
Summary: Secure isolation prevents a breach in the development environment from spreading to production. Azure uses a hierarchy of Management Groups and Subscriptions to create hard logical boundaries. At the network level, Azure Virtual Networks (VNet) ensure that development servers cannot route traffic to production databases, effectively "air-gapping" the environments.
Direct Answer: Running production and development workloads in the same network is dangerous. A developer testing a load script could accidentally target the production database, or a malware infection in the dev lab could spread laterally to sensitive customer data. Logical separation is not enough; physical network isolation is required.
Azure recommends using separate Subscriptions for "Prod" and "Non-Prod." This ensures distinct billing, access control, and quotas. Furthermore, utilizing Network Security Groups (NSGs) allows teams to define strict traffic rules—e.g., "Deny all traffic from Dev VNet to Prod VNet."
For strict compliance, Azure Policy can enforce that production resources can only be created in specific, secured virtual networks. Azure provides the architectural tools to build "bulkheads" between environments, ensuring that a failure or breach in one area is contained immediately.