A company wants to enforce three controls across all current and future subscriptions under a management group: allowed Azure regions, a required cost center tag, and approved VM SKUs. Central IT wants a single assignment and consolidated compliance reporting. What should they use?

Three separate policy assignments at each subscription scope.

Separate assignments increase management overhead and make consolidated reporting harder to maintain consistently.

A resource lock on the management group to prevent noncompliant deployments.

Resource locks are not governance policies and cannot enforce allowed locations, required tags, or SKU rules.

A custom RBAC role assigned to the management group.

RBAC controls what users can do, but it does not validate whether resource configurations meet compliance requirements.

What does this AZ-104 question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: One initiative assignment at the management group scope. — An initiative is the best fit when multiple related Azure Policy definitions must be managed and reported on as a single governance package. By assigning the initiative at the management group level, central IT can ensure every subscription beneath that scope inherits the same baseline automatically. This also produces unified compliance reporting, which is much easier to track than maintaining separate policy assignments for each rule and subscription. Why others are wrong: Using separate assignments is operationally heavier and defeats the goal of a single governance baseline. A resource lock is not a compliance engine and cannot enforce deployment rules such as region or SKU restrictions. RBAC custom roles govern administrator permissions, not whether a resource configuration matches organizational policy, so they cannot replace policy-based enforcement.

What should I do if I get this AZ-104 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.