Cloud Agility with Azure Landing Zones

Start with the Basics

Cloud Agility Starts Here.

Businesses are increasingly using Microsoft Azure to spur innovation and unlock agility. But moving to the cloud is not a silver bullet. For adoption to be successful, businesses need scalable, resilient and effective ways of innovating in the cloud.

That’s where landing zones come in. As a key deliverable in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF), landing zones are one of the most effective tools organizations can leverage to bring control and confidence to cloud transformation. As a relatively new concept, we’ve created this guide to introduce business leaders and cloud teams to the value of Azure landing zones, why they matter, and several best practices you can use to improve your path to true cloud agility.

What is an Azure Landing Zone?

One of the easiest ways to describe landing zones is with an analogy. Think of them like you would the foundation of a new building.

Every time an architect designs a building, he or she has to account for the same set of elements: plumbing, electrical, utilities, materials and so on. But, depending on the nature of the building, the way those elements are configured will vary wildly. A sports stadium will have a very different foundation than a single-story home, but both projects will have to assign where the gas lines run and what kind of concrete to use.

Landing zones are a lot like the foundation of a building, but for a specific cloud use case. Using standardized infrastructure as code templates, architecture guidelines and reference implementations, they determine all the basic building blocks of your cloud environments, such as networking, security, compliance, and identity and management rules. Simply put: Azure landing zones give you a quick, effective and repeatable template to configure Azure environments, whether it be for migrating in new workloads or providing development teams a place to innovate.

Why landing zones matter.

Imagine trying to put up the walls of a building before ever laying the foundation. Or, trying to rearrange the water lines after you’ve already added 10 stories to your skyscraper. Operating in the Azure cloud without landing zones is like that. It’s a recipe for chaos, security threats, and, at the very least, inefficiency.

By creating robust and comprehensive landing zones before you begin cloud adoption, your team will be in a much better position to start operating with real alignment and agility. They will have ready-to-go environments on demand, enabling your organization to rapidly and securely scale up or migrate in new cloud workloads, repeatably. And, you’ll be doing it all with the confidence that the infrastructure in place is secure, compliant and built to last.

TOP 3
Reasons to Build the Perfect Landing Zone

SECURE
Landing zones help protect against unwanted access, compliance issues and human error.

SCALABLE
Landing zones make cloud adoption simpler, faster and repeatable.

AGILE
Achieve business goals faster and repeatedly, with more efficiency.

Why Azure?

Trusted by 95% of Fortune 500 companies, Microsoft Azure is used by organizations of all sizes to solve today’s digital transformation challenges and innovate for the future. Azure consists of more than 200 products and cloud services, featuring:

Combined infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities
Security and compliance built in at the core, making Azure the most trusted cloud platform by the U.S. Government
Flexibility and interoperability to streamline and support today’s hybrid and multi-cloud operations
Ease of use and familiarity across IT departments
Seamless identity and access management across the most critical and popular cloud applications