Until recently, moving your enterprise IT architecture to Azure was a relatively complex process. Although Microsoft published best practice guidelines for setting up Azure, it was down to you to figure out exactly how to do this. That is until Microsoft introduced the Azure Landing Zone a solution designed to make the cloud migration process a lot simpler and more efficient.
So, what exactly is an Azure Landing Zone, and how do you begin using one?
What are Azure Landing Zones?
It can be useful to think about Azure Landing Zones with the analogy of building a home.
If you wanted to build your own property, it would be perfectly possible to dig the foundations, lay the bricks and do all the plumbing and wiring yourself. But this would also be time-consuming and there would be a real risk of making mistakes that would be difficult to fix later. If you want, you can do the exact same thing with Microsoft Azure. It’s perfectly possible to set up your environment manually, by yourself, and build out the architecture as you see fit.
Now unless you were a highly experienced housebuilder, it would usually be a whole lot easier to use readymade foundations and a blueprint to show how to do all the piping, wiring and so on. You could then customise this structure to your personal needs. The building would be architecturally sound, safe and faster to build – and require a lot less expertise. An Azure Landing Zone is a little bit like this.
With a Landing Zone, your network architecture, security, ID management and governance are all set up to work efficiently and effectively for you. You can then apply policies to suit your business, and you can expand on the blueprint and customise it as you need while still operating within secure and robust guardrails.
There are essentially two types of Landing Zone available, each with several variations:
- Slow-and-grow Azure Landing Zones
This approach is ideal for organisations that are planning to gradually expand their use of Microsoft Azure. You get a secure environment where you can start migrating some of your workloads (such as non-critical files) and set them up to run in the cloud. You can then gradually expand on this as you get accustomed to the platform.
- Enterprise ready Azure Landing Zones
Larger businesses may need a fully-fledged environment where they can migrate many (or indeed all) of their workloads and content into Azure. With this approach, you get a fully configured architecture for your business which you can then customize to your needs.
Benefits of Azure Landing Zones
Azure Landing Zones are designed to make the process of migrating to the cloud faster and more secure, while setting your company up to be future ready. Here are some of the main benefits that come with using these blueprints:
- Get set up in Azure faster
With an Azure Landing Zone, you essentially get a readymade environment where you can begin migrating workloads, users and content. That saves a lot of time and means your teams can begin using the cloud sooner.
- Flexible and future-ready
One of the most appealing features of Azure Landing Zones is that they are designed to be flexible and allow you to expand and modify the environment as you need. They are also designed to be more efficient than traditional enterprise IT architecture, and give you best practice for running your architecture in the cloud.
- A shallower learning curve
By giving you a reliable and robust foundation for your company’s cloud environment, you reduce the risk of making costly mistakes that are hard to resolve later. They also mean you spend less time figuring out the mechanics of Azure, and can concentrate on fine-tuning the environment for your company’s requirements.
Where to begin with ALZ
Setting up an Azure Landing Zone is relatively straightforward. Here is how to begin:
- Open up your Azure portal and search for ‘blueprints’.
- Select a blueprint, click ‘get started’ and create your first landing zone. A common place to begin is a Migration Landing Zone which then serves as the starting point for your blueprint.
- Decide where the Landing Zone will be stored (as in, the physical location of the server), and then it will be set up for you, and an environment will be configured.
- Next, you can edit the blueprint, assign roles and set policies for all sorts of things – including tagging or adding new resources in a group, creating artefacts and much more.
Once you have set up the Azure Landing Zone, it is then a case of migrating workloads to this environment and inviting employees to start using it.
Related: How to monitor Azure cloud adoption
Helping set up your Azure Landing Zone
Azure Landing Zones are a very welcome addition to the Microsoft Azure portal, making it easier for companies to get up and running in the cloud. At FITTS we help firms like yours to use Azure Landing Zones and configure them to their specific needs.
To find out more about Azure Landing Zones – and how we can support your migration to the cloud – contact us today.
