Landing Zones In The Cloud
Landing Zones In The Cloud
As cloud computing matures, the options for customization and personalisation keep growing as well. While that’s great for firms that need advanced options for security, audits, or special hosting concerns, it also makes it more daunting to get started with a cloud migration. Starting out a new cloud deployment today can feel like buying a car, with a sea of acronyms and obscure options to wade through.
Cloud Landing Zones are a new innovation that makes navigating those seas substantially easier. The idea behind landing zones is simple, to give a reasonable set of default choices for getting started on the cloud. Cloud Landing Zones are created by cloud providers on all the major platforms (AWS, Azure, and GCP all offer them) and embody the best practices for those platforms. So why are they worth looking into?
Manage Risk
Adopting a cloud strategy too often feels like it requires slowly learning best practices from employees with knowledge of the ins and outs of some particular cloud provider. Whereas ten years ago, it was easy to click a box and start a cloud server, there are now security roles, virtual private networks, custom server images, firewall rules, and interminable steps between you and the box you want to launch.
To be sure, those arcane rules are part of the reason the cloud is safer, more secure, and more viable today. But landing zones offer a way to get those best practices to work for your firm without having to pay outsized salaries. Amazon’s offering, for example, gets you secure identity management, code pipelines, and logging and monitoring for your deployment. These are tools you need to limit your spend, protect your assets, and leverage the agile development benefits of the cloud.
Because you’re starting from the common landing zone, you’re able to move more quickly and adapt to your organisation’s needs. Landing Zones truly start to shine when you’re working with larger deployments, and you want to deploy many cloud assets to a single provider. By offering a common starting point, they make migrations repeatable, lower-risk, and more fool proof
With a Cloud Landing Zone, you don’t have to worry about a misconfiguration causing you to not have server logs when you’re running a security audit. The cloud experts have run through the checklist for you. Simply put, it’s the easiest way to get the bare minimum any enterprise needs to get up and running in the cloud.
Baseline Performance
The other key benefit of landing zones is that they aren’t the end of the story. A typical landing zone will handle logging, security, and more but leave you options for where to go from there. In some ways, Cloud Landing Zones are a tool to get back to the old days of launching cloud servers with the click of a button (except now you’ve got the proper configuration and monitoring to make sure you’re within budget and secure).
What does that leave you? A landing zone is great for getting started, but allows you options for customization based on your organisation’s needs. The Azure Landing Zone offering allows you to see the different options after you get started. Looking to make your landing zone more performant? You can keep everything else constant and change the server types used by your deployment. Looking to beef up security? You can increase the logging, or tighten access controls.
Next Steps
Deploying a cloud landing zone is a great first step towards a well-developed strategy for the cloud. We’re experts in moving to the cloud, including starting with a landing zone and developing from there. We’re ready to start a conversation about your security, performance, and maintenance needs and what a landing zone can do for you.