Azure Landing Zone

For swift and secure cloud
foundation

Cloud is growing to be the new age technology, with a steady upsurge in the numbers of enterprises migrating their workloads to cloud environments. Cloud provides businesses with many benefits such as enhanced productivity, the flexibility to scale up or down as needed, and much better agility of infrastructure. However, enterprises opting for cloud migration need the right strategy. It is also important to have an effective operational and governance model which is in alignment with the goals and objectives of the enterprise. Hence, building an efficient landing zone becomes very crucial, as it can be the key foundation for the cloud adoption journey.

Inefficiencies during migration process cost the average company 14% more in migration spend than planned each year

38% of enterprises have seen their migrations delayed by more than one quarter

With enterprises making a move towards Microsoft Azure, there is no doubt that the Azure footprint is increasing. Most enterprises are in search of the best practices of Azure Cloud Adoption. Usually, Azure landing zones help enterprises with their initial footprint and accounts for enterprise scale, security, governance, networking, and identity. Azure landing zones can be integrated into current configurations or implemented from scratch, and they offer a scalable approach to developing your cloud environment. This modular approach is supported by common design areas that can protect the Azure cloud environment for the future growth of the business and the scale of its workloads. If you are embracing Microsoft Azure for the first time, Cloud4C can simplify the deployment of landing zones within Azure, in addition to offering advanced features and support, while maintaining Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) foundational principles.

Benefits of Azure Landing zones

Reduced risk and increased security.

Quicken migration and modernization on cloud and accelerated innovation

IT teams relieved from deployment burden

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How are Azure landing zones constructed?

To begin the construction on Azure Landing Zone, it is important to understand how the enterprises prefer to deploy them, which is followed up by the design areas and configuration options. Here are some of the design areas which contribute to the development of the landing zones.

Deployment options

The first and foremost aspect to consider is the deployment options. With every deployment or implementation option, different methods are used to align with the operating model of the enterprise. Usually, user-interface based options and scripting-based methods, along with direct deployments from GitHub are available.

Identity

The identity and access across the cloud platform can be established with best practice guidance and enabling capabilities Azure Active Directory, Azure role-based access control (RBAC), and Azure Policy. It is the best practices, decision guides and references in the Azure landing zones that will help in developing the right foundation with a safe and compliant approach.

Resource organization

Organization of resources builds strong governance. Operating model preferences are reflected by naming and tagging of standards, management group hierarchy, and segmentation of resources (subscription design). To begin with all these aspects of resource organization, landing zones offer guidance.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

For any enterprise, it is essential to ensure business continuity, reliability and rapid recovery. The design areas which are within the landing zones help enterprises to set up virtual destination environments with high degrees of protection and faster recovery options.

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is designed to support enterprises in the implementation and development of various business and technology strategies that will assist the enterprises in succeeding in cloud. The framework offers enterprises with the best practices, narrative, tools, guidance and documentation that are necessary to fulfill the short-term and long-term technology objectives influencing the business outcomes.

1

Strategy

As part of the cloud strategy, we define the business justification and outcomes of adoption.

2

Plan

We ensure to align business outcomes with actionable cloud adoption plans.

3

Ready

Here, we create the necessary cloud environment for the planned changes.

4

Migrate

At this step, enterprises can migrate and modernize their existing workloads.

7

Manage

Constant monitoring and managed services for the workloads are provided. Since most of the managed service delivery is automated, the issue detection and prevention is proactive.

6

Govern

Constant governance of the workloads for reliability, adherence to the well architected principles, availability, optimization and security is done.

5

Innovate

Once migration is completed, enterprises undertake modernization efforts and innovate.

Benefits of Azure Landing zone

Speed and scalability

With Microsoft Azure landing zone, the time taken for migration to the cloud can be drastically reduced. Usually, it takes about at least a day, however, with a landing zone, the time is reduced to a few minutes, which also yields considerable cost savings. With the right landing zone, enterprises can benefit from shorter time-to-market for new applications. Scalability is also a major factor related to landing zones. As it becomes easier to carry out extensions to new environments with landing zones, the standard profiles can be easily applied to new users.

Security and compliance

Compliance plays a very important role in the landing zone which means that the developers and engineers can work within the landing zone environment by adhering to the compliance rules. With landing zones, the enterprises will not be spending a lot of time when it comes to implementing any rules within their public cloud infrastructure. The landing zones also support enterprises in keeping the virtual environment up to date in an ongoing and uniform manner.

Flexibility

The landing zones provide a high degree of standardization. As the landing zones are API driven, the implementation of new applications becomes easier and flexible. The flexibility helps in reducing time, when the landing zone environment is scaled up or down.

Better understanding of costs

Usually, with cloud, enterprises tend to lose control of their expenses. However, with the right landing zones framework, enterprises are free to create and develop new initiatives without causing any unnecessary or unexpected costs. The landing zones help make the process transparent by ensuring every account/ subscription is visible.

Getting started with Azure landing zones

To begin the journey with Azure Landing Zones, enterprises must start with the following three steps within CAF:

1

Begin by understanding which cloud operating model fits perfectly with the enterprise’s agility and governance needs.

2

This is followed by design areas for Azure Landing zones, which provides an overview of the configuration option available.

3

The third step includes choosing the right Azure landing zone that will have their selected operating model, migration scope and velocity. Once this is done, deployment instructions and supporting scripts can automatically deploy reference implementations of each Azure landing zone.

The Implementation Process

Stage 1

Discovery: Talk to Azure experts to understand the Azure landing zone. The experts will review your current environment, and a deployment strategy can be decided.

Stage 2

Deployment: The landing zone’s deployment and documentation is completed in this stage. Cloud4C will develop the standards and policies based on the technical requirements of your business workload migration.

Stage 3

Knowledge transfer: The Cloud4C experts will share details of the deployment with the enterprise’s IT team.