Microsoft employs a shared responsibility model for cloud compliance. They are responsible for the security of the cloud (physical infrastructure, hosts, network) and provide a wide array of compliance certifications (like HIPAA, ISO, SOC) for their services. Customers are responsible for security in the cloud, meaning they must configure and use the compliant services appropriately to handle their sensitive data. This model provides the foundational assurances the healthcare provider needs.

This is the classic and most accurate analogy. Building an on-premises data center requires significant upfront capital investment in servers, networking, and facilities (CapEx – like building a power plant). With cloud services, you pay for the computing resources you use, as you use them, similar to a utility bill (OpEx – like paying for electricity). This shifts costs from large, upfront investments to predictable, ongoing operational expenses.

Elasticity is the key characteristic that allows a system to automatically scale resources out (add) or in (remove) based on current demand. This provides the “burst” capability for traffic spikes and cost savings by scaling down during low usage. High Availability is about uptime, latency is about speed, and global reach is about geographic distribution—all important, but not the direct solution to the scaling-on-demand requirement described.

Azure Virtual Machines provide the highest level of control and flexibility, allowing Contoso to migrate their monolithic application as-is. They can create a VM that matches their current on-premises OS and dependency configuration, install the application, and move it with minimal changes. This is a classic Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) lift-and-shift scenario. The other options (PaaS/Containers) require more application modification or re-architecture.

A Warm Standby strategy involves having a scaled-down version of the application always running in a secondary region. It is not fully production-scale (like Hot Standby) but has core infrastructure and services running, allowing for a relatively quick scale-up to full capacity (meeting the 4-hour RTO). Data is replicated asynchronously to meet the 1-hour RPO. This balances cost and recovery speed effectively for the given requirements.

While all options are good cost management practices, Azure Budgets with alerts provide proactive, immediate feedback. They can be set at the subscription, resource group, or service level and will trigger email alerts when spending reaches a configured percentage of the budget. This would have alerted the team soon after the VM started accruing unexpected costs, allowing for timely investigation and shutdown. The other options are reactive (tags/reports), restrictive (locks), or about optimization, not prevention of waste.

The Archive tier is designed for long-term storage of rarely accessed data that can tolerate several hours of retrieval latency. It is the lowest-cost storage tier in Azure Blob Storage. This perfectly matches the requirement for “archival product images” stored at “the lowest possible cost” where retrieval time of “a few seconds longer” (actually hours) is acceptable. The Cool tier is for infrequently accessed data with lower latency (hours), and the Cold tier sits between Cool and Archive.

A Network Security Group (NSG) acts as a basic stateful firewall for controlling traffic to and from Azure resources like VMs and subnets. It operates at the network layer (OSI Layer 3 & 4). Creating an inbound NSG rule to allow TCP port 443 from the internet (`source: Any, port: 443`) and setting a default `DenyAllInbound` rule is the standard, granular way to achieve this specific objective. Azure Firewall is a more advanced, centralized service for broader network policies, which would be overkill for this simple VM-level rule.

The principle of least privilege means giving an identity (user, group, service principal) the minimum level of access (permissions) needed to perform its intended function—nothing more. In Azure RBAC, this translates to carefully selecting a built-in role (like `Virtual Machine Contributor` instead of broader `Contributor`) or creating a custom role with precise permissions. This minimizes the potential damage from credential compromise or human error.

Microsoft employs a shared responsibility model for cloud compliance. They are responsible for the security of the cloud (physical infrastructure, hosts, network) and provide a wide array of compliance certifications (like HIPAA, ISO, SOC) for their services. Customers are responsible for security in the cloud, meaning they must configure and use the compliant services appropriately to handle their sensitive data. This model provides the foundational assurances the healthcare provider needs.0