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Before rolling out Microsoft Foundry agents, decide who owns each agent, which identity and permissions it will use, what data it may access, what review it needs before production, and how it will be evaluated and monitored afterward. Foundry provides capabilities such as identity controls, role-based access, tracing, and evaluations; your organization must set the policy, assign accountable people, and define what happens when an agent fails or behaves unexpectedly.
1. Who owns each agent, and what governance baseline applies?
Set one enforceable baseline for agents across the organization, aligned with existing Azure governance and security practices. Microsoft’s governance guidance treats ownership, identity, access, lifecycle, monitoring, data governance, security, and approved development patterns as parts of the same operating model.
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Name owners and decision-makers
Assign an accountable owner to every agent and name the people or teams responsible for security and risk, responsible AI, data governance, privacy and compliance, and platform operations. Microsoft’s Center of Excellence role guidance describes these functions, including responsibility for data quality, classification, permissions, sensitivity labels, and regulatory requirements.
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Choose how governance signals will be assembled
Microsoft describes two possible patterns, not a universally superior choice. Agent 365 is presented as an enterprise agent control plane; published Foundry agents can appear in its registry through registry sync. If Agent 365 is not adopted, Microsoft points to separate signals from Entra for identity, Purview for data governance and compliance, Defender for security monitoring, and Azure Monitor for centralized monitoring.
| Approach | What the cited Microsoft guidance establishes | What the organization still needs to decide |
|---|---|---|
| Agent 365 with Foundry registry sync | Microsoft describes Agent 365 as an enterprise agent control plane and documents registry sync for published Foundry agents. Microsoft Agent 365 integration with Foundry. | Whether it is available and appropriate for the tenant, region, and licensing configuration, and who will operate it. |
| Separate Microsoft services | Microsoft identifies Entra, Purview, Defender, and Azure Monitor as governance signals that can be used when Agent 365 is not adopted. Govern and secure AI agents across the organization. | How to connect the signals, assign operational owners, and enforce consistent policy across services. |
The cited guidance does not establish comparative cost or performance for these approaches. Verify availability, region, tenant configuration, licensing, and prerequisites in current Microsoft documentation before making an integration a rollout dependency.
2. What identity and permissions will each agent use?
Decide whether an agent needs a dedicated Microsoft Entra identity, what resources that identity may access, who approves and reviews its permissions, and how its identity is provisioned and removed through the agent lifecycle. Microsoft’s Foundry Agent Service overview describes agent identities and role-based access control through Microsoft Entra and Azure RBAC. It also describes publishing agents as managed resources with stable endpoints and configured enterprise identity and access controls.
Distinguish acting for a user from acting as itself
Record whether the agent acts on behalf of a signed-in user or operates autonomously under its own identity. That distinction affects how access is granted and how actions are attributed during review. Microsoft’s Agent 365 integration documentation describes an autopilot acting as itself under its own identity.
Review the actual role assignments
Published agents receive distinct identities that require manual role assignments, according to Microsoft’s Foundry agent identity documentation. The documentation also notes that Foundry RBAC role names have been renamed while role IDs and core permissions remain unchanged. Validate current role assignments and documentation during rollout instead of relying on an older role label.
3. Which data may an agent use, and under what restrictions?
Set data boundaries before connecting knowledge sources, tools, or other systems. Define which sources are approved, how information is classified, and what retention, privacy, regulatory, and corporate restrictions apply. Microsoft’s organization-wide governance guidance treats control over how agents access, process, store, and retain data as a distinct governance domain.
Turn policy into reviewable rules
- Identify approved data sources and the business purposes for which an agent may use them.
- Map classifications, permissions, and sensitivity labels to the agent’s access.
- Set expectations for processing, storage, retention, and audit evidence.
- Assign data stewards and privacy or compliance reviewers to approve exceptions and changes.
Microsoft’s roles and responsibilities guidance assigns data governance functions responsibility for data quality, classification, permissions, sensitivity labels, and regulatory requirements. The services used to collect governance signals do not make these policy decisions for the organization; map each agent’s data access and retention to your own obligations.
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4. What review and release gates does the agent need?
Scale review to the agent’s impact and authority. An agent that can affect consequential decisions or act with broad permissions warrants stronger controls than a narrowly scoped assistant. Establish the risk categories your organization will use and specify the evidence and approvals required at each level.
Set release gates and human oversight
For higher-risk uses, Microsoft’s risk governance guidance lists a named owner, production SLA monitoring, pre-release security and responsible AI assessments, decision-rights rules, an incident-response plan, and quarterly maturity review among the controls to consider. A release gate is a checkpoint before production, not a substitute for ongoing ownership.
Document what the agent may decide autonomously, when it must seek approval, and how an authorized person can intervene. Define what evidence is needed for the agent’s risk tier, such as security review, responsible AI assessment, privacy and data review, and sign-off from the accountable process owner. Keep audit logs sufficient to establish what the agent did, for whom, and using which data.
Plan suspension and incident response before launch
Name the people who can disable or roll back an agent, the conditions that trigger that action, and the team responsible for investigating incidents. Include changes to tools, permissions, data sources, or agent behavior in the change-control process so that a material change can trigger another review.
5. How will the team evaluate and monitor agents after launch?
Define success and safety criteria before deployment, then establish a baseline using representative evaluation data. Microsoft’s agent evaluation guidance describes setting acceptance thresholds; its 85% task-adherence passing rate is an example, not a universal requirement or a reported result. Choose thresholds that match the agent’s purpose, risk, and acceptable failure modes.
Assign evaluation and production responsibilities
- Choose representative tasks and evaluation data, including cases where the agent should decline, ask for clarification, or route work to a person.
- Set quality and safety criteria and define who approves the acceptance threshold.
- Decide what changes require reevaluation, including changes to instructions, models, tools, permissions, or connected data.
- Assign owners for telemetry review, alert handling, user support, and incident response.
- Specify what monitored behavior triggers investigation, rollback, or disablement.
Use platform observability, but define the operating response
Microsoft Foundry documents tracing, monitoring, and evaluations with built-in dashboards. Its Foundry overview also describes unified RBAC, networking, policies, and a management plane for agents, models, and tools. The Agent Service overview describes versioning, publishing, managed endpoints, agent identity, private networking options, RBAC, and integrated content-safety controls.
These capabilities can support a governance program; they do not determine its policy thresholds, ownership, risk tolerance, review cadence, or operational response. Decide who reads the signals and what action follows before production traffic depends on them.
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