Why are landing zones essential to Azure success?
So here you are sitting down at your desk with a fresh cup of coffee to begin another workday from home. You open Outlook to check your e-mail and review your calendar for the day. You hop on your morning Teams meeting and then the voice of a colleague intones, “The marketing team wants to put their website in Azure, and we want to do it quickly.” Suddenly, that dark brew coffee tastes a little bitter, the leather chair feels a little stiff.
You find yourself shifting around uncomfortably. “We don’t have a way to bring them into Azure quickly.” You are thinking about the last time you did an Azure project. It took 6 months. The team had to bring in a consulting firm to do the work and then picked up and left you with an environment you did not know how to manage.
The reality of this situation may not be a perfect picture of you or your morning but the unsteady response of this hypothetical “you” is quite real for dozens of companies operating in the cloud today. They often struggle with the very thing cloud technology excels at: getting started quickly.
There is more to “getting started quickly” than just deploying a solution as fast as possible. It is about having the confidence to deploy cloud resources without being concerned about creating unnecessary risks and without worrying about whether you have forgotten something essential. Let us revisit this hypothetical you again.
One month has gone by since the marketing team’s original request. You sit down at your desk, take a sip of your favorite coffee, and hop on the morning meeting. Your boss asks in a firm voice, “Are we any closer to having marketing in the cloud?” You let out a smirk and click the button to unmute. “Yes, we are ready to go. I am sending over a questionnaire for the marketing team to fill out with the information we need to get them started.”
What changed? You added a powerful tool to your belt. The tool is referred to as a Landing Zone.
The Landing Zone is a logical construct which ensures you are meeting the technical requirements of your business and providing everything essential that is required for a project to get started in the cloud.
You have thought about access requirements, you have a plan for networking between on-premises and the Cloud, you have a plan for securing the environment, you have a plan for monitoring the environment, you have a plan for how to ensure the environment is resilient against failures. Best of all, it is now a repeatable process that you can keep delivering. You even have the option of automating the whole thing, making the process as simple as “fill out a form” and press a button.
The Landing Zone for Azure considers everything a team needs to get started quickly while complying with your company requirements. Specifically, the Landing Zone seeks first to address Identity, Networking, and Security. From those core pillars, we can also identify governance requirements that help answer, “what questions do I have to onboard a new team?”
If you need help with designing these Landing Zones in Azure, please consider our Azure Governance Workshop.
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