To evaluate regulatory compliance across a managed environment, what solution is recommended?

Using an Azure Policy initiative to subscriptions is an effective approach for evaluating regulatory compliance across a managed environment. Azure Policy enables organizations to create, assign, and manage policies to ensure that resources are compliant with internal and external regulations. An initiative is a collection of policies tailored to address a particular compliance requirement, allowing a streamlined way to apply multiple policies consistently across multiple subscriptions.

This method effectively automates the compliance checking process, allowing organizations to identify non-compliant resources in real time and take necessary actions to rectify compliance issues. The integration of policy evaluation helps maintain governance and security standards, thus ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements across the controlled environment.

In contrast, custom compliance reports and Azure Security Center assessments serve different purposes. Custom compliance reports provide specific insights but lack the proactive enforcement capabilities that Azure Policy offers. Azure Security Center assessments offer a security viewpoint rather than a direct regulatory compliance framework. Compliance Manager is designed to help manage compliance processes and track compliance with specific regulations but does not enforce compliance in the same automated manner as Azure Policy initiatives.