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Landing Zones should not be viewed merely as the first step toward transitioning to the cloud; rather, they should be considered a fundamental component in the development of your business’s technological infrastructure, especially if it aims for digital transformation.

It’s important to note that while Landing Zones serve as a support for cloud scaling, their development also supports workloads, infrastructure, or applications while adhering to security, governance, and compliance standards.

“Landing Zones support business growth.”

What is a Landing Zone?

A Landing Zone is an ecosystem composed of accounts, services, or elements that work together as a starting point for deploying and securely scaling multiple workloads and applications to the cloud, following design patterns, practices, and standards specifically defined for each business.

In simple terms, Landing Zones function like secure containers where various sources of work and information can be safely managed, allowing reliable transfer to their destination (the cloud).

Key Components for Implementation

For successful execution, it’s important to recognize the key components of a good Landing Zone that will maximize the benefits of data hosting centers, regardless of your cloud provider:

  • Standardized Account or Tenancy: Any tenancy should ensure guaranteed security for processes and have someone responsible for monitoring or reviewing cloud service consumption. This ensures spending control for proper attribution throughout the organization.
  • Identity and Access Management: Defining user ID configurations, access, and password standards will support the creation of roles and apply access controls so that users can only perform necessary actions, safeguarding information from unauthorized access.
  • Security: This is one of the most important factors in the Landing Zone and should not be treated as an independent topic; elements such as compliance and data residency must be considered. This will help plan a centralized approach to security and logging, providing a single pane of glass across multiple accounts or environments.
  • Networking: You should define structures for your networks, security groups, and connectivity requirements to ensure proper passage to the cloud.
  • Automation: Infrastructure as code ensures that configurations are managed consistently, evolving through DevOps disciplines and tools.

“To implement a Landing Zone, it’s essential to analyze each business’s needs and translate them into technical decisions regarding networking, security, access, etc.”

Why Use a Landing Zone?

This will ensure a place in the cloud to deploy and organize workloads, allowing for safe, reliable, and fast information processing. Especially in managing accounts that include different services, data and information will be controlled according to the created profiles, as mentioned earlier.

When done correctly, this automation will allow for the seamless and secure transfer of other processes. Thus, the changes required for a subsequent process, based on process traceability and code definition, will align with security guidelines.

Types of Zones:

Now we need to define the types of zones so you can identify which one fits your company’s size and the needs identified in your cloud transition:

  • Platform Landing Zones: Subscriptions implemented to provide centralized services, often managed by a central team or a number of central teams divided by function (e.g., networking, identities), to be used across various workloads and applications. Platform Landing Zones represent key services that often benefit from consolidation for operational efficiency and ease. Examples include networking, identity, and management services.
  • Application Landing Zones: One or more subscriptions implemented as an environment for an application or workload. Application Landing Zones are placed in management groups like “corp” or “online” under the “Landing Zones” management group to ensure that policy controls are applied correctly.

What Does It Enable?

A Landing Zone enables the migration, modernization, and innovation of applications at an enterprise scale. This approach considers all platform resources needed to support the client’s application portfolio, without distinguishing between infrastructure as a service or platform as a service.

You may need a Landing Zone if you meet any of the following factors:

  • Your organization needs to quickly launch and implement workloads in the cloud.
  • Your applications need to reside in a secure infrastructure environment.
  • You need to make decisions regarding your accounting structure, networking, security, and access management for widely used platforms or applications.
  • You require administrative isolation between workloads.
  • Strong data recovery and/or audit isolation is necessary for you.

If you’ve identified any of these factors, contact us for support in building and implementing your Landing Zone. Write to us at comunicaciones@bpt.com.co.

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