What is a Landing Zone?
Think for instance, you are building a new house. Before beginning the actual construction, you will need to have all the necessary resources in place first. In the same way, Landing Zones are the necessary building blocks for a successful cloud adoption.
In simple terms, a Landing zone is the environment for hosting workloads pre-provisioned through code. But in qualitative terms, it is much more than that. Landing zone integrates the proven best practices in architectural blueprint of security, governance, networking, management, identity and tooling for successful cloud adoption.
Why We Need a Landing Zone?
While the cloud offers unprecedented opportunities for greater flexibility, agility and management, it can also lead to serious security and performance issues if not designed and deployed properly. Furthermore, lack of governance can lead to higher-than-expected costs.
You see, the cloud has a huge number of services for anything you want for enterprise IT; it can be easily provisioned within a click and boom, you have a resource set up. That being said, it may not be a good approach to cloud adoption for any organization unless planned carefully as to which type of server would be best fit to spin up and in which location for optimum latency and performance. Organizational CIOs, CTOs and CEOs need to ensure that it is deployed in a secure, scalable and cost-optimized manner, following the best practices and organizational requirements.
The stability and reliability of any platform is shaped by how strong its foundations are, and the same holds true for public cloud. Landing Zones are aimed at building that strong foundation. Instead of making you go through the pain of trial-and-error, a Landing Zone sets you up for success as you build fully leveraged cloud-native services.
Steps in Building Landing Zone:
Plan > Build > Migrate > Early Life Support > Continuity & Update According to Feedback
Landing Zone in Azure
The Azure landing zone comes as a part of multi-subscription Azure environment including scale, security, governance, networking and identity. It enables enterprise-level application migration, modernization and innovation on Azure without a hitch.
The Landing Zone in Cloud can take you through the new tools to help you assess where you are on your cloud journey and how to automate the build out to host your workloads on Azure. Instead of going through the pain of ‘experience’, you get a clear path forward, minus setbacks, and set up your business for future growth, not just react to crisis.
With the Landing Zone in Azure, you can easily create a framework for your organization to perform and manage your Azure cloud migration efficiently. You can select the parameters that will be used to determine how to use your data and application in the Azure cloud.
Azure Landing Zones Options
As the business IT needs and objectives vary from one organization to another, the Azure landing zone implementation is available in two formats to meet the operational needs of evolving cloud portfolio.
Scalable: All Azure landing zones support cloud adoption at scale by providing replicable environments. They have consistent configuration and controls, regardless of the workloads or Azure resources deployed to each landing zone instance.
Modular: All Azure landing zones provide an extensible and near-composable approach to building the environment, based on a common set of design areas. The extensibility allows organizations to scale specific elements of the environment easily according to evolving requirements.
Azure Landing Zone Implementation Options
There are two primary approaches to landing zone implementation.
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You can start with the Azure landing zone accelerator:
If your business requirements call for a sophisticated implementation right away, with fully integrated governance, security, and operations, this is the best choice. Eventually, you can modify it using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to set up and configure an environment as per your requirements.
The Azure landing zone accelerator is a ready-made Azure-based deployment experience for organizations that fits with the operating model and resource structure they plan to use. It is recommended because it is the quickest way to achieve a highly sophisticated, scaled-out environment.
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Customize for specific business needs:
If you want to build your environment to meet specific requirements, or develop internal skills, this approach is advisable. It focuses on the basic landing zones considerations that are required to start your unique cloud adoption. All technical and business requirements are considered in your environment configuration.
While the best practices for customization are aligned with Azure landing zone, there will of course be added investment in terms of time and effort to fit specific business requirements.
Migrate and Transform on Azure with Cloud4C
Poorly planned migrations could result in overprovisioning and unnecessary cloud sprawls that compromise operational budgets and security. Fool-proof your Azure migration with Cloud4C, the world’s leading application-focused Cloud MSP and an Azure Expert MSP.
With 11 Azure Advanced Specializations, Cloud4C helps firms move to Microsoft Azure leveraging a standardized Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (the Azure CAF). The Cloud4C team of experts would develop a comprehensive blueprint for your Azure journey spanning Discovery, Landscape Assessment, Azure Landing Zone configurations, and Azure migration nuances.
Additionally, it helps enterprises in management and security of assets on Azure. It will identify the best-fit strategy and ideal stack of native Azure tools to address different business needs and function fail-proof on Azure Cloud. Accelerate your cloud journey on a fully secure and compliant foundation, with Cloud4C.
You can learn more about Cloud4C’s unique, automation-backed, and Cloud Adoption Framework-compliant Azure Migration services here.
