What is Azure Landing Zone?

What is a Cloud Landing Zone? 

A landing zone in cloud computing refers to a pre-configured environment that provides a framework for deploying, managing, and scaling cloud resources. It sets up best practices, governance policies, and security measures right from the start, ensuring that the cloud infrastructure is organized and compliant with regulatory standards. This approach helps in managing complex cloud deployments efficiently and securely. 

What is an Azure Landing Zone?

A Landing Zone is a method of achieving scalable and modular growth within Microsoft Azure. A Landing Zone does this by providing common design areas that need to be considered for the majority of Cloud Adoption journeys. Essentially, Landing Zones provide a foundation for growth, but in a scalable and modular fashion – acknowledging that there is no single technical solution for all types of environment

Landing Zone Design Areas

Whether we are designing for a large, multi-location, enterprise hybrid-cloud deployment or deploying a simple, isolated test environment, each of the design areas below should be considered within our Landing Zone.

• Enterprise enrolment – Do we have a tenant in place that will support our growth and needs moving forward? Will we use EA/CSP/PAYG etc? How will we structure our subscriptions?

• Identity – How will identity and access be controlled and managed?

• Network topology and connectivity – What will our network topology be? How will our resources and locations be connected? What will our needs look like in days/weeks/years to come?

• Resource organization – How will we organize our resources to allow for growth without red tape? Considering our needs around management groups, subscriptions, our business areas, different teams, and more.

• Governance disciplines – How do we stay compliant? How do we enforce security requirements? How do we ensure our data sovereignty?

• Operations baseline – How will we manage, monitor and optimize our environment? How will we maintain visibility within our environment and ensure it operates as required?

• Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) – How will we architect for continuity and protect our data? Have we considered the need to replicate data or provide a method of restoration? Do our proposed methods meet the RPO and RTO objectives of our organization?

• Deployment options – How will we deploy our Landing Zone and resources moving forward? Will this be a manual process? Will we consider Infrastructure as Code? What methodologies for deployment could we use?

Enterprise Scale – Design Principles

Enterprise Scale design principles serve as pointers for organizational decisions toward achieving your required Azure growth. These are the critical principles that need organizational decisions to achieve enterprise scale, and the provided reference architectures (above) are based on these Principles.

• Subscription democratization – Considering how Subscriptions can be used to enable management and scale aligned to business needs and units.

• Policy-driven governance – Using Azure Policy correctly to provide compliance, whilst ensuring application owners are not hindered in migrating their workloads and applications.

• Single control and management plane – Providing a consistent experience for operations teams, utilizing role-based access and policy-driven controls.

• Application-centric and archetype-neutral – Using a focus on application-centric migration rather than a lift-and-shift mentality. Also focusing on providing a foundation for all application types that the enterprise could deploy.

• Align Azure-native design and roadmaps – Using Azure-native services and capabilities, ensuring that the enterprise can benefit from new capabilities.

• Recommendations – Balancing functionality, using preview services for testing/development/future enhancements, and using technical roadmaps to allow migration.

Landing Zone Benefits Azure Landing Zones offer numerous advantages:

Structured Environment 

Azure Landing Zones establish a well-organized cloud foundation with ready-to-use configurations, which accelerates the deployment process and reduces the risk of misconfigurations. This structured approach ensures that all deployments follow Microsoft's best practices and architectural guidelines, providing a solid foundation that supports complex deployments across various scenarios. 

Security and Compliance 

Azure Landing Zones are designed with security at their core, incorporating Azure’s robust security features to safeguard resources. By pre-configuring security controls and compliance policies, they help ensure that your cloud environment meets necessary regulations and standards from the outset. This proactive approach significantly mitigates potential security risks and compliance issues. 

Cost Management 

Managing costs effectively is crucial in cloud computing, and Azure Landing Zones provide tools to help monitor and control spending. They offer insights into resource utilization and spending patterns, enabling organizations to optimize their cloud expenses. By setting budgets and alerts, businesses can prevent cost overruns and ensure financial governance in their cloud operations. 

Scalability 

One of the key advantages of Azure Landing Zones is their inherent scalability, which allows organizations to expand their resources as needed without major reconfigurations. This flexibility supports growth and can accommodate varying workloads, making it easier for businesses to adapt to changing demands while maintaining performance and security. 

Operational Efficiency 

Azure Landing Zones enhance operational efficiency by automating many routine administrative tasks. This automation reduces the need for manual intervention, lowers the chance of human error, and speeds up operations. Integrated management tools help streamline monitoring, management, and maintenance tasks, ensuring the cloud environment runs smoothly and efficiently.