Enterprise AI Landing Zone
A comprehensive solution accelerator for governing, observing, and accelerating AI deployments at scale with unified security, compliance, and intelligent orchestration.

62% of practitioners cite security concerns as the top blocker to wider AI adoption
71% of enterprises struggle to track AI usage, enforce quotas, and report costs
47% of organizations require explicit guardrails before deploying AI agents
70% of customers need an AI registry for agents and tools to scale AI adoption

AI Citadel Governance Hub turns these challenges into platform strengths — governed access, transparent consumption, defensible guardrails, and a shared catalog of reusable AI capabilities.

Citadel Governance Hub is an enterprise-grade AI landing zone that establishes a centralized, governable, and observable control plane for all AI service consumption across multiple teams, use cases, and environments.

Instead of fragmented, unmonitored, master-key model access, Citadel Governance Hub provides a unified AI gateway pattern built on Azure API Management (APIM), adding:

• ✅ Intelligent routing and load balancing
• ✅ Security enforcement and compliance guardrails
• ✅ Usage analytics and cost attribution
• ✅ AI registry for agents, tools, and services
• ✅ Automated onboarding and governance workflows

This elevates AI consumption from ad-hoc experimentation to scalable, auditable, and cost-attributable platform capability.

AI Citadel Governance Hub is built on three foundational pillars that address enterprise AI adoption challenges end-to-end:

🔐 Why Governance Matters: Without centralized AI governance, organizations face unpredictable costs, reliability issues, security risks, developer friction, and compliance nightmares. AI Citadel fixes this by building guardrails into every AI call.

Key Capabilities:

📊 Full Visibility = Trust & Confidence: AI Citadel provides holistic observability through a dual-layer approach ensuring teams can debug issues, assure quality, and govern compliance in real-time.

As part of AI Citadel Governance Hub, a centralized monitoring without requiring agent code changes provides:

Platform observability is enabled out-of-the-box for all AI workloads routing through the AI Citadel Governance Hub.

🚀 Build Fast, Build Right: AI Citadel Governance Hub support integrating existing agents and tools in addition to support integrating new agents which enable teams to experiment and innovate quickly without sacrificing governance or quality.

AI Citadel Governance Hub provides automatable agent onboarding configurations through Citadel Access & Publish Contracts along with reusable blueprints and templates for common AI patterns.

Key Capabilities:

Citadel Governance Hub enables secure, scalable AI deployment across diverse enterprise scenarios:

• Centralized access control for all AI services across departments
• Cost attribution and chargeback to business units
• Compliance reporting and audit trails
• Shadow AI prevention and policy enforcement

• Discover and reuse agents through the AI Registry
• Govern agent-to-agent communication
• Monitor multi-agent workflows end-to-end
• Enforce safety guardrails across agent interactions

• Unified governance across Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, and open-source models
• Consistent security policies regardless of backend
• Seamless migration and failover between providers
• Cost optimization through intelligent routing

• Financial services compliance (SOC 2, PCI DSS)
• Healthcare data protection (HIPAA)
• Government security requirements (FedRAMP)
• PII detection and anonymization

• Support thousands of concurrent AI applications
• Near real-time usage monitoring and alerts
• Capacity planning and quota management
• Performance optimization and troubleshooting

AI Citadel Governance Hub follows a hub-spoke architecture that integrates seamlessly with your existing enterpriseAzure Landing Zone:

In this approach, the Citadel Governance Hub is deployed within the existing hub virtual network (VNet) of your Azure Landing Zone.

This allows for direct communication between the unified AI gateway and connected agentic spokes, leveraging existing security and networking configurations.

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sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    
    participant Agent as 🤖 Spoke Agent<br/>(Spoke Network)
    participant Gateway as 🚪 AI Gateway<br/>(Hub Network)
    participant Backends as ⚡ AI Backends<br/>(Hub/Spoke Network*)

    Note over Agent,Backends: 🔷 Hub-Based Governance Architecture
    
    rect rgba(0, 120, 212, 0.1)
        Note right of Agent: Step 1: Request Initiation
        Agent->>+Gateway: AI Request with Auth Token
    end
    
    rect rgba(80, 230, 255, 0.1)
        Note over Gateway: Step 2: Governance & Security Enforcement
        Gateway->>+Backends: Routed Request to LLM/Agent/Tool
    end
    
    rect rgba(16, 124, 16, 0.1)
        Note over Backends: Step 3: AI Processing & Response
        Backends-->>-Gateway: AI Response + Telemetry
    end
    
    rect rgba(147, 51, 234, 0.1)
        Note over Gateway: Step 4: Response Validation & Logging
        Gateway-->>-Agent: Governed AI Response
    end
    
    Note over Agent,Backends: ✅ Complete observability with zero agent-side instrumentation

Note: When AI Backends reside in a different spoke networks, their traffic should be forced through the hub firewall to maintain integrity of the network traffic flow.*

• Routed requests originate from spoke-hosted agents.
• Traffic is directly forwarded to AI Gateway for governance, security, and observability enforcement.
• Traffic intelligently routed out to managed LLMs, tools, or downstream agents (gateway-spoke-network).

In this approach, the Citadel Governance Hub is deployed within a dedicated spoke VNet that connects to the hub VNet via VNet peering.

Agentic workloads in other spokes are routed first to the hub network firewall through direct peering, then forwarded to the Citadel Governance Hub gateway network.

This provides an additional layer of isolation for AI workloads while still enabling secure communication with other enterprise resources in the hub.

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sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    
    participant Agent as 🤖 Spoke Agent<br/>(Agent Spoke Network)
    participant Firewall as 🛡️ Hub Firewall<br/>(Hub Network)
    participant Gateway as 🚪 AI Gateway<br/>(Gateway Spoke Network)
    participant Backends as ⚡ AI Backends<br/>(Spoke Network*)

    Note over Agent,Backends: 🔷 Spoke-Based Governance with Firewall Isolation
    
    rect rgba(0, 120, 212, 0.1)
        Note right of Agent: Step 1: Request Initiation
        Agent->>+Firewall: AI Request via Peering
    end
    
    rect rgba(209, 52, 56, 0.1)
        Note over Firewall: Step 2: Network Security Inspection
        Firewall->>+Gateway: Forward Approved Traffic
    end
    
    rect rgba(80, 230, 255, 0.1)
        Note over Gateway: Step 3: AI Governance Layer
        Gateway->>+Backends: Governed Request to LLM/Agent/Tool
    end
    
    rect rgba(16, 124, 16, 0.1)
        Note over Backends: Step 4: AI Processing
        Backends-->>-Gateway: AI Response + Telemetry
    end
    
    rect rgba(147, 51, 234, 0.1)
        Note over Gateway: Step 5: Response Validation
        Gateway-->>-Firewall: Validated Response
    end
    
    rect rgba(209, 52, 56, 0.1)
        Note over Firewall: Step 6: Egress Inspection
        Firewall-->>-Agent: Secured AI Response
    end
    
    Note over Agent,Backends: 🔒 Defense-in-depth with dual security layers<br/>✅ Network isolation + AI governance

Note: * When AI Backends reside in a different spoke networks, their traffic should be forced through the hub firewall to maintain integrity of the network traffic flow.*

• Routed requests originate from spoke-hosted agents (agent-spoke-network).
• Traffic first routed to hub network firewall for inspection (hub-network).
• Hub Firewall forwards to AI Gateway for governance, security, and observability enforcement (gateway-spoke-network).
• Traffic intelligently routed out to managed LLMs, tools, or downstream agents (through the hub firewall or directly).
• AI Backend responses may still be routed through the hub firewall for final inspection before reaching spoke agents, depending on governance policy.

The central governance layer with unified AI Gateway that all AI workloads route through.

AI Gateway security & compliance enforcements components:

Supported by subscription wide security services:

Optionally you can deploy one or more generative AI services in the hub:

Pluggable components to enhance AI Citadel Governance capabilities:

To govern AI agents through AI Citadel Governance Hub, agents must communicate with AI backends (central LLMs, tools and agents) through the Citadel's unified AI gateway.

Guidance to bring existing agents is through updating endpoint and credentials to access central LLMs, tools and agents through the unified gateway.

Recommendation is to use Azure Key Vault to store these information due to its sensitivity when the agent is running on Azure.

Leverage Citadel Access Contracts to declare the required access to LLMs, tools and agents through the gateway along with precise governance policies.

Building new agents is accelerated through the Citadel Agent Spoke landing zone guidance, which provides isolated, secure environments designed specifically for AI agent development and deployment. Each spoke serves a single business unit or major use case, ensuring clear boundaries, simplified management, and integration with the Citadel Governance Hub for centralized governance.

Deployment Approach:

• One spoke per business unit or use case - Dedicated environments for insurance claims processing, customer support automation, or other agentic scenarios
• Flexible runtime options - Choose between AI Foundry Agents (fully managed runtime) or Azure Container Apps (bring-your-own-agent)
• Pre-configured infrastructure - Automated deployment via Bicep or Terraform with all networking, security, and monitoring built-in
• Hub integration - Seamless connection to Citadel Governance Hub through Citadel Access & Publish Contracts

Core Infrastructure Components:

Deployment Patterns:

• Greenfield (Standalone with New Resources) - Creates all infrastructure from scratch with new VNet and Log Analytics workspace
• Brownfield (Standalone with Existing Resources) - Integrates with existing enterprise landing zones, reusing VNets and centralized monitoring

Note: Citadel Agent Spoke deployment supports the AI development velocity pillar and is designed to work in conjunction with Citadel Governance Hub. Multiple spokes can connect to a single hub for unified governance and observability.

Citadel Governance Hub seamlessly integrates with Citadel compliant Agents environments through automated governance alignment:

Declares the governed dependencies an agent needs—LLMs, AI services, tools, and reusable agents—along with precise access policies:

• Model selection and capacity allocation
• Regional preferences and compliance requirements
• Safety and security guardrails
• Usage quotas and cost limits

Describes the tools and agents a spoke exposes back to the hub:

• Publishing rules and governance gates
• Ownership metadata and documentation
• Security posture and compliance status
• Discovery and cataloging in the AI Registry

Benefits:

• ✅ Audit-ready traceability through infrastructure-as-code
• ✅ Faster release cycles with automated approvals
• ✅ Reduced manual effort in governance onboarding
• ✅ Continuous policy compliance verification

🔗 Learn More: Citadel Access Contracts Guide

Azure Requirements:

• Azure CLI and Azure Developer CLI installed and signed in
• A resource group in your target subscription
• Owner or Contributor + User Access Administrator permissions on the subscription
• All required subscription resource providers registered.

Development Tools: Although it is recommended to have the below tools installed on a local machine or through DevOps agents to conduct the provisioning, you still can leverage Azure Cloud Shell (mounted to storage account) as an alternative which has all the tools pre-installed.

• Azure Developer CLI (azd)
• Azure CLI
• VS Code (optional)

Deploy your Citadel Governance Hub in minutes with Azure Developer CLI:

# Authenticate and setup environment
azd auth login
azd env new citadel-governance-hub-nonprod

# Deploy Citadel Governance Hub
azd up

💡 Tip: Use Azure Cloud Shell to avoid local setup. Review main.bicep configuration before deployment.

Once deployed, access your Citadel AI Gateway through Azure API Management:

Key Endpoints:

• AI Gateway: https://<your-apim>.azure-api.net
• AI Registry: Azure API Center portal
• Monitoring Dashboard: Application Insights
• Usage Analytics: Power BI Dashboard connected to Cosmos DB (optional)

Master Citadel implementation and operations with our detailed guides:

• Accelerate AI ROI - Deploy AI solutions 10x faster with pre-built templates
• Reduce Risk - Enforce compliance and security policies automatically
• Control Costs - Precise cost attribution and quota management
• Demonstrate Governance - Audit-ready compliance and transparency

• Focus on Innovation - Governance handled by the platform
• Self-Service Access - Discover and consume AI services through the registry
• Rich Tooling - Support for Copilot Studio, Semantic Kernel, LangChain, AutoGen
• Fast Iteration - CI/CD integration with automated testing

• Zero Trust Architecture - Private endpoints and managed identities throughout
• Content Safety - Automatic prompt and response filtering
• PII Protection - Detect and redact sensitive data automatically
• Audit Trails - Complete logging and trace capabilities

• Single Pane of Glass - Unified monitoring across all AI workloads
• Proactive Alerting - Detect and remediate issues before impact
• Performance Insights - Detailed traces and analytics
• Capacity Planning - Usage trends and forecasting

Citadel Governance Hub is continuously evolving as part of the Foundry Citadel Platform vision:

• Unified AI Gateway with intelligent routing
• Platform observability
• Universal LLM, Azure OpenAI, Azure OpenAI Realtime, AI Search, Document Intelligence integration
• PII detection and content safety
• Usage analytics and cost management

• AI Evaluation pipeline at the gateway level
• Add support for A2A and agents publishing
• Defender enablement

• Autonomous agent governance and orchestration through DevOps end-to-end approach

We welcome contributions from the community! Whether it's:

• 🐛 Bug reports and fixes
• 📖 Documentation improvements
• 💡 Feature requests and enhancements

Please see our Contributing Guide for details.

• 🐛 Issues: GitHub Issues
• 💬 Discussions: GitHub Discussions

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.