Businesses seeking digital transformation need a strong foundation from which to build. An effective operational and governance foundation that aligns with the business goals and objectives is essential. After all, without a strong foundation, challenges will inevitably arise.
That’s why establishing an efficient cloud landing zone plays a major role in the journey to the cloud.
What is a Cloud Landing Zone?
Landing zones provide a pre-configured set of resources to host workloads in private, hybrid, or public clouds. They are the first step to successful cloud migration, basically serving as a template. Yet, since not every business is the same in terms of objectives and needs, there is no “one size fits all.”
Building a cloud landing zone enables quick growth through repeatable processes and automation. Each organization should assess a few considerations regarding landing zones during the design and implementation phase.
Security
A landing zone should provide a centralized Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. This solution is the underlying foundation for compliance. In essence, the centralized IAM solution allows for users to be kept in a single managed area. This additionally enables tight password rotation schedules, easy procedures for adding or removing users from the platform, or performing in-depth access auditing.
Another fundamental part of cloud landing zone security is roles. Defined roles allow for engineers and administrators to manage the platform effectively and allow for different access levels across an organization.
Also, Company-wide compliance and data residency policies can be implemented with landing zones.
Network Connectivity
A typical cloud landing zone features a basic networking layout, which allows connectivity between individual systems in the cloud organization. This is a critical area, as a strong network infrastructure can prevent issues later on. The networking design might also include things like VPC peerings, VPN/DirectConnect attachments, and more.
For example, elements such as web application firewalls are a major consideration when establishing network design measures. Outlining connectivity of resources and locations is a crucial component of an efficient landing zone.
Some landing zones strictly define the topology for the network in the cloud. After all, defining a clear network topology is a key enabler for any hybrid multi-cloud strategy. Which ultimately depends on the needs and goals of the business seeking a digital transformation.
Automation
A cloud landing zone is only the foundation of an organization’s environment, which is constantly evolving. But some things should not evolve. Instead, some areas of the landing zone can be automated to improve efficiency by increasing productivity, scalability, reliability.
Automation ensures that the infrastructure is optimized to be repeatable and can evolve as use is refined and demands grow. A lack of automation in the initial cloud landing zone can hamper deployments in the future.
For instance, a landing zone provides a framework for creating and baselining multi-account automated environments. Which, in the end, saves time in the setup and also implements a baseline for security measures.
Standardized Account or Tenancy
While a hierarchy is useful to manage resources at scale, it is limited to modeling only a few business dimensions, such as organization structure, regions, workload types, cost centers, and so forth. A hierarchy lacks the flexibility to layer multiple business dimensions together.
Tags provide a way to conditionally allow or deny policies based on whether a resource has a specific tag. Tags and conditional enforcement of policies are used for fine-grained control across an organization’s resource hierarchy.
Tagging policies ensure spend is controlled and properly attributed across the organization.
Benefits of Cloud Landing Zones
A sound governance and operational model is key to successful cloud migration. However, most organizations do not pay attention to this factor, leading to longer migration cycles, higher cross-team interdependencies, and increasing operating costs.
Therefore, cloud landing zones provide benefits to organizations such as:
- Reduced manual effort, improved quality, and faster service delivery
- Enhanced scalability, security, and governance
- Increased network resilience and performance
- Reduced operational cloud cost
- Higher agility through a well-defined operating model
With the benefits clear, how can an organization properly strategize and execute the first step in its cloud journey?
Accelerate Your Journey to The Cloud
Instead of wasting time with drawn-out designs and plans that aren’t fully clear, choose a solutions expert that helps you get to the cloud quickly and efficiently.
Pandera’s Cloud Landing Zone Accelerator enables rapid access and configuration to cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud — built in a scalable and secure manner that allows for workload migration or to build net new.
Our cloud infrastructure specialists work with you at every stage of this process, gaining a detailed understanding of your unique business requirements and the best for you to accelerate your journey to the cloud.
We do this through a four-phased approach:
- Evaluate — Your unique business requirements, defined in full with our cloud infrastructure specialists.
- Scope — A fully defined cloud environment that addresses immediate needs and your long-term strategy.
- Execution — With our proven accelerator we deploy your fully defined cloud environment in a fraction of the time.
- Optimize — Work with our Cloud Managed Services team to deploy new features and get the most out of your cloud environment.
Whether you are planning or are already in the midst of your transformation journey, our experts can help you accelerate your transformation initiatives. There’s no better time to get to the cloud than now.
