Comparison

Stratoscope vs. Azure Policy

Azure Policy enforces declarative rules at the control plane. Stratoscope governs the things Policy can't — WAF posture, cost intelligence, architectural drift, and human-approved remediation for the environment you already have.

The short answer

Azure Policy is a guardrail system — it prevents non-compliant resources from being created or flags them when they drift. Stratoscope is a governance platform — it manages the broader question of whether your Azure environment is well-architected, cost-efficient, and remediating the right things in the right order. Policy governs new deployments; Stratoscope governs the environment you already have.

Different tools, different layers

Azure Policy governs deployments

Policy definitions run at the Azure Resource Manager layer — when a resource is created or modified, Policy evaluates the request and can deny it, audit it, or automatically remediate it via DeployIfNotExists tasks.

It's the right tool for enforcing “no resources outside approved regions” or “all VMs must have a specific tag” at creation time.

Stratoscope governs the running environment

Stratoscope operates at the governance cycle layer — continuously assessing your existing environment against WAF pillars, cost benchmarks, and your own standards. It surfaces findings, proposes multi-step remediation plans, and executes with your approval.

It's the right tool for “our environment has 847 resources, here are the 12 that need attention this week, in priority order, with the plan to fix them.”

What Azure Policy can't cover

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Cost governance: Policy can't analyze your spend, detect anomalies, or surface cost optimization opportunities. Cost governance is entirely outside its scope.

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WAF assessment beyond tag/config rules: Policy checks resource configuration properties. It can't assess architectural patterns, evaluate reliability across a service topology, or reason about performance efficiency.

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Change control fit: Policy's remediation tasks run automatically. For teams with change control requirements, automatic execution is a compliance problem, not a feature.

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Context-aware recommendations: Policy definitions are context-free — they evaluate resource properties, not your architecture decisions, your runbooks, or what your team has decided is acceptable risk.

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Multi-step remediation planning: Complex fixes — rotate a certificate, update a network security group, re-provision a resource — require ordered multi-step plans. Policy's remediation tasks are single-step per definition.

Feature comparison

Capability	Azure Policy	Stratoscope
Primary function	Declarative guardrails at the control plane	AI-guided closed-loop governance across discovery, assessment, remediation, and verification
Enforcement model	Deny/audit/modify at resource creation or modification	Propose → approve → execute → verify at governance cycle time
Drift detection	Compliance state reflects current policy assignments	Sweep-by-sweep diff: tag changes, SKU changes, permission changes, new resources
Remediation	DeployIfNotExists + remediation tasks for supported resources	Multi-step AI-generated plans with exact commands, human approval at every step
Coverage scope	What can be expressed as Azure Policy definitions	All 5 WAF pillars, cost intelligence, permission posture, architectural patterns
Human approval	Not applicable — enforcement is automatic	Required for every mutating operation. Cannot be bypassed.
Audit trail	Policy compliance log + Activity Log	Finding → proposal → approval → execution → ARM verification, queryable from console
Context awareness	Policy definitions are context-free	Informed by your architecture docs, runbooks, and your team's past decisions
Cost governance	Not in scope	FOCUS-standard cost data, period-over-period anomaly detection, discount intelligence
Change control fit	Enforcement is automatic — doesn't fit traditional change control	Every fix is a proposed change awaiting human approval — fits change control natively

Govern the environment you already have

Policy guards the front door. Stratoscope handles everything already inside.

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