How Azure Landing Zone can help your organisation build a better Azure environment

Why an Azure Landing Zone?

Building an Azure environment that meets your organisation's unique needs can be a complex and challenging process. From infrastructure design to security and compliance requirements, there are multiple factors to consider when designing for optimal performance and functionality. However, with an Azure Landing Zone, you can avoid these complexities and build an Azure environment from the ground up, that aligns with your organisation's needs.

What is an Azure Landing Zone?

An Azure Landing Zone creates a framework for your organisation that enables you to efficiently perform and manage your cloud adoption. A landing zone provides a structured approach to building a foundation that aligns to a set of guidelines, best practices, and resources that help your organisation set up a well-architected environment for application and/or data environments, whilst implementing a secure, scalable, and efficient cloud infrastructure.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for all technical environments. There are two Azure landing zone implementation options that can assist you in meeting the deployment and operations requirements of your expanding cloud portfolio:

Start small and expand – this option offers a simple starting point to build your own solution with minimal subscriptions, which you scale only as needed. Regardless of the workloads or Azure resources deployed to each landing zone, all Azure landing zones support cloud adoption at scale by providing repeatable environments with consistent configuration and controls.

The diagram below is an example of a small-scale landing zone target architecture.

Enterprise-scale – this options offers an entire Azure tenant reference regardless of your scale-point, which includes cloud-native operations. The enterprise-scale architecture represents the strategic design path and target technical state, for your Azure environment. It will continue to evolve alongside the Azure platform and is defined by the various design decisions that your organisation must make, to map your Azure journey.

Not all enterprises adopt Azure in the same way. The CAF (Cloud Adoption Framework) for Azure enterprise-scale landing zone architecture varies between customers. The technical considerations and design recommendations of the enterprise-scale architecture might lead to different trade-offs, based on your organisation's scenario. Some variation is expected, but if you follow the core recommendations, the resulting target architecture will set your organisation on a path to scale sustainably.

Whether you are looking to deploy your first production application to Azure or to manage a complex portfolio of tech platforms and workloads, Softcat can support. We can design, build, and deploy the Azure landing zone, and the implementation options can be tailored to your specific requirements.

What are the benefits of Azure Landing Zone?

• Accelerated deployment:

With Azure Landing Zone, you can shorten the time required for building and deploying an Azure environment by providing an established structure, templates, and blueprints. This leads to faster go-to-market timing with less effort needed to build and deploy.

• Consistency in design:

Azure Landing Zone enables organisations to maintain a consistent set of standards and guidelines to follow when building and deploying Azure infrastructure. This consistency drives operational efficiency, promotes standardisation, and helps minimise risk.

• Enhanced security and compliance:

Security and compliance are primary considerations for all deployments, especially for large-scale deployments in the cloud. Azure Landing Zones provide organisations with secure, scalable, and compliant architectures that incorporate best practices and industry standards. These practices address key compliance regulations such as ISO27001, Payment Card Industry (PCI), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) among others.

• Improved management:

By using Azure Landing Zone, organisations can easily manage their Azure environment, from resource control to access control, regardless of the size and complexity of the deployment. Azure Landing Zone can simplify and automate management tasks, which results in cost reduction and an optimised deployment.

Get started with Azure Landing Zone with support from Softcat

Deploying Azure Landing Zone helps organisations build more efficient and secure Azure environments quickly and easily. With a pre-defined framework, landing zones provide organisations with guidance and structure to create efficient environments that are built for growth and scale. Whether you are a small or large organisation, Microsoft's Azure Landing Zones deliver accelerated and consistent deployment, enhanced security and compliance, and allow for improved management options.

When implemented through an experienced consulting partner such as Softcat, you can leverage our experience to implement a secure, scalable infrastructure. Get in touch with Softcat and start accelerating your path to the cloud today with Azure Landing Zone.