Cloud

The motive behind using Landing Zones for seamless large-scale migrations

Publish Date: March 25, 2020

Once only a technological curiosity, the cloud today is one of the most integral aspects of running a modern business. Enhancements in the IT environments over the years has enabled digital transformation for companies big and small. As with cloud-computing and storage platforms, businesses can get manifold advantages over conventional on-prem systems – such as higher efficiency, faster innovation, lower cost, and proactive maintenance with minimalized efforts.

But a large-scale move to the cloud cannot be a mere matter of ‘lift and shift.’ This is a complex endeavor that mandates companies to build new capabilities. As such, the often-overlooked capability of planning the migration to the cloud brings in long-term complications. One of the top migration barriers cited by IT leaders worldwide has been the complexity of managing the change, and the difficulty in making a compelling business case or proof-of-concept (POC) for cloud adoption.

In this regard, architecting ‘Landing Zones’ is the best way to scale any migration to the cloud. Based on industry best practices, landing zones are the first step towards a successful cloud migration, wherein all your business considerations and boundaries are baselined for centralized access, comprehensive security, and governance.

In the previous blogs, we went over what a landing zone is and what benefits they offer for your business. In case you are planning to migrate to the cloud, this blog will help you understand the top ways, and a landing zone allows you to scale the move for the long term.

Why scale cloud migration – defining the problem

Imagine you are running an airport in a large, thriving metropolitan, and had to construct a new, larger airport. You would have a lot of considerations at play, such as:

How is the traffic going to flow, for the planes or the vehicle fleets supporting them?
How are the staff and passengers going to flow through the terminals? How will their access management be planned?
How will I plan security in terms of passenger safety, explosives tests, baggage checks, emergency quarantines, etc.?
How do I manage customs, compliance, etc.?

Given that airports are enormous pieces of infrastructure, the laundry list of the utmost considerations are also critical. Similar to the airport, as a business leader, you would want to design your operations for peak efficiency – regardless of the unpredictable, adverse circumstances. You may also not want to burn unnecessary money on things you won’t need. You need primarily three things for your cloud foundation to be strong – security & compliance, resilience & scalability, and adaptability or flexibility.

Let’s dive into the considerations as to why and how landing zones can help scale your cloud migration.

Multi-account strategy: You can set up a secure, multi-account environment based on cloud migration best practices. By implementing the baseline for the environment to run secure and scalable workloads, and also significantly bring down the effort and time required to create several user accounts, and subsequent accounts in an efficient, hassle-free way later in the same organization.
Integrated DevOps: Your operational and development teams must overcome the ‘wall of confusion’ to deliver cross-functionally rich products. The landing zone can be integrated with your internal channels (say, GitLab for developers) to push changes into the pipeline continuously. At the same time, operationally, the efficiency, as well as governance on the cloud environment, stays sound, secure, and agile.
Automated account provisioning: Landing zones deploy automated account provisioning, which essentially provides automatic configurations of new accounts with managed access for users – be it internal users (or employees) or external users (vendors/partners/clients). Without it, setting, configuring, and validating new accounts would take days.
Global and account-level security guardrails: Landing zones allow self-service of security guardrails while setting up accounts and resources. These include integrated access management policies, Identity & Access management policies, and the ability to set up configurations at a global and account level for comprehensive security, monitoring, and alerting.
Multi-account governance: You can identify the correct course of action and guiding conditions to enforce governance. You can also allow automatic enabling, configuring of rules, and aggregation of dashboards – all of which help businesses to highlight the compliant and non-compliant resources. You can even go a step further and create options to remediate non-compliant resources using other cloud tools.

Prepare today for seamless tomorrows

It is noteworthy that landing zones are not necessarily a service, but, a solution – assembled with a series of existing cloud services into a comprehensive architecture that allows your business to operate seamlessly with the appropriate structural guardrails.

Successful cloud migrations begin with a well-planned landing zone strategy that allows centralized logging, cross-accounts permissions framework, and automated self-service features to reduce future business complexities.

As such, landing zones and multi-account strategies have defaulted to become the best way to scale and manage large-scale cloud deployments. Often, they are the very first, as well as one of the most critical steps towards a successful move to the cloud.

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