Happy New Year! Time to remind ourselves about the importance of a proper tagging strategy.
In the rush to modernize, migrate, and scale, most organizations eventually hit the same wall: cloud sprawl. Cloud sprawl is where your resources multiply, costs blur, ownership gets murky, and suddenly the cloud feels less like a strategic patform and more like a digital junk drawer of things that cost $ to have. Plus, you have your leaders asking constantly about why the cloud is so expensive. It’s not, you just need to organize and build better.
That’s where tagging is important. It’s not flashy, not complicated, but absolutely foundational to your organization.
Why Tagging Matters
Tagging is the practice of attaching key‑value metadata to cloud resources. In Azure, these tags become the backbone of governance, cost management, automation, and operational clarity. Other cloud platforms follow the same principle, but Azure’s implementation (and the Cloud Adoption Framework) is especially powerful for FinOps and enterprise-scale environments.
When done well, tagging transforms your cloud from that junk drawer into an organized cutlery drawer, if you put your forks where they need to go. I don’t. I mix the little ones with the big ones until someone else yells at me for it.
What Tags Unlock for You
A strong tagging strategy enables:
- Cost allocation and chargeback — Tags like CostCenter or Project make it possible to distribute cloud spend accurately across teams and initiatives.
- Resource governance — Tags identify owners, environments, and compliance requirements, helping teams stay accountable and secure.
- Operational automation — Backup schedules, lifecycle rules, and security policies can all be automated based on tags.
- Optimization insights — When workloads are tagged, it becomes far easier to spot rightsizing opportunities, idle resources, and cleanup targets because you can narrow them down to your teams or functional units.
Core Tag Categories Every Organization Should Use – In My Opinion
While every company’s tagging strategy is unique, most mature cloud environments rely on a few universal categories. In previous comments, I stressed that the process is more important at first than the actual results. Start with the most broadest tag – Org/Tenant/Department and try to come up with a system to apply tags programmatically. And then add the next tag. Don’t forget to add in Azure Policy to assist with compliance, at least a DoNotEnforce, Audit Only policy to track your progress.
- Financial tags — CostCenter, Department, BusinessUnit, Project
- Operational tags — Environment (Prod/Dev/Test), Application, Workload Names, maybe an ID number
- Accountability tags — Owner, SupportContact, Team, Developers
- Compliance tags — DataClassification, BackupPolicy, RegulatoryScope
These tags become the connective tissue between your organization’s different departments. Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework emphasizes building a consistent, organization-wide tagging strategy before scaling workloads This includes:
- Defining mandatory vs. optional tags
- Aligning tags with naming conventions
- Enforcing tags through policy
- Ensuring tag inheritance for cost reporting
Azure’s native tools—like Azure Policy, Cost Management, and Resource Graph—turn tags into actionable insights rather than static labels.
Tagging Across Clouds
AWS, GCP, and Azure all support tagging, but the principles remain the same:
- Keep tags consistent
- Keep them meaningful
- Keep them enforced
- Make them easy to apply
Cloud tagging isn’t just a technical practice—it’s a cultural one. When your teams understand the “why,” tagging becomes a natural part of the deployment lifecycle rather than an afterthought.
