Trustrorthy AI
Knowledge Base
Core Platform Services
Core Platform Services include many of the infrastructure, security, governance, management, and monitoring services used across a cloud ecosystem. Largely synonymous with a “cloud landing zone”, the Reference Ecosystem shows (left to right) Purview, Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), Key Vaults, Azure Monitor, Azure DevOps (ADO), Security Center, Sentinel, Application Insights, and Power Platform Managed Environments as examples. There will surely be others, but we have chosen these as representative “core services” that nearly every modern cloud ecosystem should contain to technically support an organization’s AI strategy.
Figure 10: A magnified view of the Core Platform Services Neighborhood from the Reference Ecosystem.
Core Platform Services, and Microsoft Purview Managed Environments in particular, also play a vital role in data governance, which refer to measures taken to secure, govern, cleanse, establish lineage and compliance, manage metadata, etc. In other words, have you established the conditions for your data to produce quality responses when consumed by AI?
Though establishing baseline data governance through Microsoft Purview is very much a part of your core platform services, it’s too important a topic to hide away. So, we’ve broken it into its own dimension which we’ll discuss separately as part of the Scaling AI pillar later in the paper.
In any case, our core platform services approach to data readiness involves good, old fashioned best practices around building and maturing your cloud landing zone and the ongoing maturation of your cloud estate. Given the convergence of data platform infrastructure and business applications, this must necessarily include deployment of typical Azure as well as Power Platform security and infrastructure measures. Here we’re talking about nuts-and-bolts capabilities such as identity management via Microsoft Entra ID (formerly “Azure Active Directory”), as well as services that are less well-known outside of the circles of technologists who specialize in them. Examples of these are Key Vaults, Azure Monitor, Security Center, Managed Environments, etc. The essential task here is to mature your cloud infrastructure in accordance with industry best practices, with an emphasis on data security and governance.
Technical documentation on this subject abounds, so we’ll not overextend this discussion. The real question that every organization must answer in evaluating its current state and direction for core platform services is whether it has built a broadly based cloud landing zone that provides for the technical availability, management, and governance of its cloud infrastructure (Azure, in the case of Microsoft), data platform (Fabric and related services), and business applications (Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Azure application services), as well as the application lifecycle management (ALM) necessary to shepherd both traditional and AI-based workloads to production.¹