As a business, your cloud migration needs to be smooth and secure, and you need it to enable business progression and future growth. With an Azure Landing Zone, you will get all this and more. Get Your Free Instant Service Quote
When businesses are beginning their cloud adoption and migration journey, one of the most important things that need to be established is a landing zone, a well-architected environment where workloads, servers, and resources can live when hosted within Azure. Establishing a landing zone is almost parallel to developing a new physical data centre because you will need storage, security roles, network subnets, and more.
Cloud adoption and migration have been the next rational steps for businesses in the technological and economic landscape. With a rising trend to remote work, businesses have had to make quick adjustments to the new landscape. Cloud migration can be intimidating, taxing, and prolonged if you are not prepared with the right tools, strategies, and foundations needed to guarantee a successful cloud migration.
As a business, your cloud migration needs to be smooth and secure, and you need it to enable business progression and future growth. With an Azure Landing Zone, you will get all this and more.
What are Azure Landing Zones?
Regardless of where your workloads are being hosted, there are unequivocal components you will need to support each workload. When you think about the building of a new data centre, you have to make sure you have the key components, such as security, electrical components, cooling, networking, etc. before you can install a single workload.
When workloads are hosted in the cloud, there are key things you need to install on your workloads or your servers, like the following:
- Networking
- Monitoring
- Identity Management
- Access Management
When your workloads are hosted in the cloud, you will also need to remember the importance of security and compliance, as well as backup and disaster recovery strategies. While you may not always need them from the very beginning depending on what your business needs, thinking about them can definitely help you significantly in your migration journey.
This is what a landing zone is; it helps you gain a clear understanding and build the solid foundation you need for hosting your workloads. A landing zone is generally the first step in your cloud migration journey. The infrastructure is what allows you to scale additional stories on top of it without the chances of it crumbling into tiny pieces, but the design and foundation have to be correct.
If you are migrating your data to the cloud, a landing zone will be the starting destination area on the cloud, where the initial applications will work from each other after the successful migration. Before you decide to move to the cloud, you will need to assess certain considerations such as the following:
- The network topology and its efficiency
- The reliability and efficiency of your connectivity
- The security of a diverse group of accounts and subscriptions
A landing zone is your one-stop-shop for all business-related considerations by having a measured cloud infrastructure. When you get everything right the first time, you will ensure all key services are where they should be and are properly configured before the deployment process begins.
What is Leading the Adoption?
One of the main players in the adoption of a landing zone is that it allows you to save a significant amount of time by automating the setup of an environment to run workloads that are scalable and secure. Regardless of the steps you take to create a landing zone, you should make sure you incorporate the best practices.
Best practices can include the following:
- Security controls of multi-account structures
- Foundations for scalability
- Self-servicing options
Azure Implementation Methods
Once your landing zone has been designed, you will need to implement it. While you could deploy it using the Azure Portal, you may want to consider automating it. When you view the landing zone implementation options, you will be able to view multiple templates you can deploy or use as a foundation to help you begin your implementation process.
Gaining the Azure Experience
We understand many customers want to begin the implementation process as quickly as possible so they can gain Azure experience. While there may not be anything completely wrong with this, the right framework and governance will usually be the missing piece when this route is taken. Certain issues will not be clarified, such as authorisation and operational, and not all information will be discussed.
While you can start directly, the real operation may not be possible or the first workloads will need to be rebuilt. When you are operating under a test environment, the test environment should remain a test environment and not go any further. If you want to test Azure, you may feel more comfortable taking the sandbox approach.
Your End Goal
An Azure landing zone package should achieve a secure adoption, operational success, and long-term efficiency and resiliency. The success of your cloud adoption journey will be measured by the time it takes for your business or organisation to become competent in the adoption and operation of cloud technologies.
Steadfast Solutions Azure Capabilities
As a Microsoft Azure Expert MSP, Steadfast Solutions is experienced in recognising the right mechanisms to provide the proper offerings. We will support your business throughout its entire cloud adoption journey, including the design and implementation process, automation, and preparation for the Azure operating model.
Cloud technology can enable your business or organisation to do incredible things. Businesses of all sizes are embracing the transition and are adopting cloud for a variety of workloads. Steadfast Solutions delivers customised cloud adoption services that will fully address any adoption challenges you may have and help you achieve your goals.
With an effective cloud migration strategy and an established landing zone, your business can reduce costs and enjoy quicker migration periods. With the right landing zone, you can be assured that you will reduce any unnecessary spending.
Are you migrating to the cloud? At Steadfast Solutions, we want to help you on your road to success. Please do not hesitate to contact us today for more information on how we can help you with your cloud migration.