What is a Cloud Landing Zone and why is it important?

One of the strengths of the Cloud is that it’s very easy to setup and start using. However, it’s this simplicity and flexibility when deploying workloads to the Cloud that can also lead to problems if due consideration isn’t put into the initial setup.

Imagine a scenario where you were planning to build a factory. When looking for a location you would take several factors into account, including:

• Is there enough land to build what you need?
• Is there easy access to enough power?
• What roads are nearby to be able to get raw materials in and take the product out?
• How far away are the local fire, police depts and hospitals and what are their capabilities?
• Are you likely to get skilled workers in the local area?

You would, of course, need to make sure that all these factors were considered before designing and building your factory. The same due diligence should be applied when looking to setup a new environment with your chosen Cloud provider.

Don’t let your ‘experiment’ turn into Frankenstein’s Monster

It would be easy to deploy a workload to the Cloud, quickly, as an ‘experiment’.  You start to work with it, you like how it’s working, it’s fast, it’s reliable, you start to depend on it more and more until it becomes an integral part of your platform estate.  As a result, you’re likely to want to add more services or expand on what you already have; your Cloud presence starts to grow organically.  But very quickly you might find that:

• You don’t have control of who is creating what.
• There’s no consistency in the services used, such as logging, monitoring, VM types, authentication.
• Configuration management is confused.
• You don’t know how much you’re spending.
• Security and compliance status is unknown and difficult to track.
• The network isn’t properly managed for risk of subnet range clashes and other issues.
• Disaster recovery and resilience capabilities are inconsistent.
• You’ve under or over provisioned services that cause performance issues or waste money.
• You find it hard to scale due to the way the platform is configured.

Going back and resolving these issues when you’re already established in the Cloud, with workloads in flight, can be a complex and costly undertaking.

There is a better way.

The good news is, everything you need to ensure that these scenarios don’t happen is already available. You just need to make sure that you think about how the services available can be integrated, allowing you to build a robust platform that’s agile enough to grow with your organisation.  This is known as building your Landing Zone.

When designing your Cloud Landing Zone there are some key factors that you need to think about. Whilst not an exhaustive list, here are our top 10 things to consider when building your Cloud Landing Zone.

1. Scale – how might the platform need to grow, in either direction?
2. Security – what are your security needs and how can you make use of the security tooling built into the Cloud?
3. Resilience – how do you ensure your systems and data are safe, reliable, and resilient?
4. Governance – how do you control who can do what and keep track of it? What are your rules around what can be created, how it can be created, how much can be spent?
5. Networking – how do you design the network so it can scale, can be integrated with existing networks, can connect through to existing datacentres to form your hybrid Cloud?
6. Identity – how do you manage the users that have access to your Cloud environments?
7. Operations – how do you manage/facilitate your operations team’s processes and ways of working?
8. Deployment options – do you build your infrastructure manually or can you make use of automation to ensure consistency?
9. Resource organisation – how you are going to organise your Cloud based resources to ensure the environment is easy to understand and manage?
10. Monitoring – What tools you will use for consistent monitoring and how will you use the information gathered to inform on system status, errors, KPI’s, security, etc.

Creating a Landing Zone that has all these considerations factored in will give operations teams the confidence and capability they need to deploy workloads quickly, and with agility. You’ll also know exactly what your Cloud environments consist of, how much they cost and, crucially, you’ll have the reassurance that they are secure and compliant.

This isn’t always easy; it takes time, and you need to know the correct questions to ask. It’s not likely a task that you will do frequently, but we do.  We know the questions to ask, and the pitfalls to avoid. We have the experience to deploy the building blocks that you need, giving assurance that your Cloud deployment is Future Ready. We’re here to help – find out more about our Future Ready Cloud services.