Cloud migration has been the next logical step for businesses in the modern technological and economic landscape. With the increased shift to remote work, organisations have had to adapt quickly to the new terrain, and the cloud has made that possible. But cloud migration can be daunting, challenging, and long if you are not prepared with the right foundations and strategy needed to guarantee cloud migration success.
As a business, you need your migration to be seamless and secure, and to enable business continuity and future growth. With an Azure Landing Zone, you can be assured that this is exactly what you will get.
What is an Azure Landing Zone?
While not essential to your cloud migration process, a landing zone is a highly recommended preconfigured platform used to easily transfer your data and applications during cloud migration. It provides you with a great starting point for your cloud adoption by allowing for a seamless and secure migration which prioritises security and compliance.
To make things a bit clearer, it might be easier to view it like this: Imagine you want to stay in contact with people outside of your region; you could do this by writing letters, but the written correspondence is a long process. So, you decide to buy a phone to make things easier and speed up the communication channels. You don’t NEED the phone, of course, but the phone you buy makes it easier for you to stay in contact by calling or texting, which is exactly what you want. But perhaps you like to use your phone for other activities too – activities that not everyone needs or wants their phone for. For instance, you might use your phone to read the news, plan your daily tasks, or keep your sensitive information like passwords or credit card details secure yet quickly accessible. In this case, you will customise your phone to suit your needs.
Both handsets – the standard and customised – fulfil their required purpose and make life easier, but the customised one supports more of your individual habits and desires so is more suited to you. This is essentially what a landing zone does. It provides you with a basic platform to achieve your goals in cloud migration faster with the opportunity to customise the space for your specific needs.
Azure Landing Zone Architecture
Azure landing zone architecture is a scalable and modular environment that follows key design principles to accommodate all your application portfolios and enable migration, modernisation, and innovation at scale. It uses subscriptions to isolate and scale application resources and platform resources. Platform resources are shared services that support the applications, while application resources are the workloads themselves. Azure landing zone architecture helps you achieve consistent and repeatable infrastructure, governance, security, and management across your Azure environment.
Benefits Of Azure Landing Zones
The benefits of building a landing zone are numerous and they will continue to be experienced long after it has been built. So, what can you expect?
- Reduced Operational Costs: with a landing zone, you can save time and money by automating processes and data transfers, meaning less manual handling.
- Enhanced Speed and Scalability: it will take significantly less time to prepare for cloud migration because actions that normally take days will now take minutes. Landing zones also make it easier to expand your environment, meaning it is easier to grow your business faster.
- Security, Governance, and Compliance Measures: during the cloud migration process, landing zones protect your sensitive data through a defined set of cloud security services and best practices. And, to ensure your migration is seamless and risk free, landing zones allow you to primarily migrate low-risk workloads before migrating higher risk workloads.
Azure Landing Zones Preparation Principles
As mentioned, the benefits of a landing zone are many, but you can be guaranteed a better experience with the following principles for landing zone success:
- NETWORKING SERVICES help with continuity as you can ensure your apps remain connected while retaining control over workloads without disruption.
- IDENTITY MANAGEMENT rules give you the power to control external access to your data. With the correct set up, you can get your low-risk workloads moving and discover more about cloud capabilities.
- GOVERN AND SECURE your environment to comply with industry regulations by integrating compliance policies and setting security controls to protect your data.
- MANAGE AND MONITOR your performance to build a strong foundation for your workloads.
Success is a Landing Zone Away
Landing zones are the foundation for success when adopting the cloud without which you stand to experience longer migration periods and a higher cloud spend. They are the smart choice to guarantee that your organisation gets to where you want it to go faster, and Intelliworx Managed IT can help you on your journey. Contact the team today to discuss how they can help you reach your goals.
