Introduction:
The future cloud enterprise requires experts who are not simply knowledgeable in theoretical concepts but have the hands-on capability to coordinate complicated online settings. The certification of these people is the Microsoft AZ-104: Azure Administrator certification, which represents the industry-standard certification. It fills the gap between the basic knowledge and a professional level of architecture by concentrating on the daily deployment, administration, and supervision of a Microsoft Azure environment of an organisation. Earning this associate-level credential as businesses start moving to hybrid and multi-cloud solutions is a guarantee that you will be at the head of the technological change.
Master Identity and Governance Azure:
The successful management of the cloud starts with a safe and well-managed base. This area is concerned with Microsoft Entra ID (previously, Azure Active Directory) to provide the right people with access to the right resources. In 2026, the most important security perimeter is identity, and it is essential to have the capability to handle users, groups, and administrative units. To further know about it, one can visit Azure Training. To ensure that governance is kept within limits, administrators also need to learn how to use such governance tools as Azure Policy and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). This ensures that resources are not spread around multiple subscriptions against their will.
- Manage Microsoft Entra Objects: Create and administer users, groups and device identities and set up self-service password resets.
- Apply RBAC: Attach standard and custom roles appropriately in the appropriate scope to uphold the principle of least privilege.
- Azure Policy Enforcement: Implement policies to be able to enforce organisational standards and measure compliance throughout the entire cloud setup.
- Subscription Management: Define resource tags, administer costs using budgets and use management groups to provide hierarchical control.
- Resource Locking: Use delete or read-only locks to ensure unintentional changes to mission-critical cloud resources.
- Governance and Licensing: Keep track of the use of licenses and update all Entra ID objects in bulk to ensure running efficiency.
Install and administer Scalable Storage Solutions:
Data is the blood of any organisation, and Azure offers a number of services depending on various performance and cost needs. The AZ-104 syllabus is devoted to the implementation and analysis of storage accounts, and the ways of securing data and its accessibility. The professionals should be made aware of the differences between Blob storage of unstructured data and Azure Files of managed file shares so that redundancy and replication plans are consistent with the disaster recovery goals of the business.
- Storage Account Configuration: Configure storage accounts with either LRS, GRS or ZRS based on the durability requirements.
- Secure Access Management: Use Shared Access Signatures (SAS) and storage access keys to grant time-limited secure access to information.
- Azure Blob Storage: This allows the management of container-level settings and application of lifecycle management policies to the data to move between hot, cool, and archive storage levels.
- Azure Files Integration: Author and deploy SMB based file shares and deploy Azure File Sync to connect on-premises servers to the cloud.
- Data Management Tools: Use Data Migration and Data Administration with Azure storage explorer and Azcopy.
- Object Replication: Configure replication to various regions so that data is available and complies with the strict compliance requirements.
Deploy and Operate Azure Compute Resources:
The drivers of cloud applications are compute resources. An Azure Administrator is required to have the skills to deploy and manage virtual machines (VMs), containers, and specialised web services. This part of the certification points out the significance of high availability with the help of Availability Sets and Availability Zones. As there is the emergence of microservices, administrators are additionally expected to manage containerised environments through the use of Azure Container Instances (ACI) and Azure Container Apps to make sure that applications can scale in line with user demand.
- Virtual Machine Deployment: Set up VM sizes, images and extensions and also make sure they are connected through managed disks.
- High Availability Strategies: Introduce Availability Zones and Availability Sets to achieve a 99.99 SLA on business-critical applications.
- Scale: Sets Management Scale up and scale down the number of VM instances automatically, depending on demand or a schedule.
- Container Orchestration: Provide and operate lightweight applications in containers with Azure Container Registry and Azure Container Instances.
- App Service Implementation: Installs web applications, scales, and sets up custom domains and SSL settings for public services.
- Automated Patching: Use the Azure Update Manager to keep diverse compute resources up to date, as well as healthy, automatically.
Set up and Control Virtual Networking:
Networking can be mentioned as the most difficult but also fundamental aspect of the AZ 104 Certification exam. It is the development of an environment supporting the security of interaction among all other Azure services. This involves the establishment of Virtual Networks (VNets), subnets, and peering to enable the resources in other networks to transact privately. Administrators should also learn how to use traffic management tools such as the Azure Load Balancer and Application Gateway to make sure that the traffic is distributed effectively and safely on the pools of backends.
- Virtual Network Peering: VNets may be connected across regions or subscriptions to enable a seamless, private communication between resources.
- Network Security Groups (NSGs): Author and administer security rules that might be used to filter both inbound and outbound traffic at a subnet or network interface level.
- Azure Load Balancer: Set up load balancers, both external and internal, to spread large amounts of traffic to healthy VM instances.
- Name Resolution: configure Azure DNS zones to offer effective name resolution of services within and outside the company.
- Azure Bastion: Secure (RD + SSH) access to VMs via the Azure portal without using public IPs.
- Hybrid Connectivity: Use VPN Gateways and ExpressRoute to make an on-premises data centre link to the Azure cloud safely.
Conclusion:
The AZ-104 exam is not only about getting a badge, but it is also about demonstrating that you can manoeuvre through the intricacies of a current cloud-based system. Through identity, storage, compute, and networking, you can be the technical hero of digital transformation in your organisation. The Microsoft Azure Certificationconfirms your practical mastery of such tools as PowerShell, the Azure CLI, and ARM templates. So you become a highly demanded professional in the market where practical experience is highly appreciated. In need of further development in your current job or a jump to a new profession in cloud operations, the Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate credential is the surest way of demonstrating your potential.