A sound governance and operational model is key to successful cloud migration. However, most enterprises do not pay attention to this factor, leading to longer migration cycles, higher cross-team interdependencies, and increasing operating costs.
Building a landing zone is therefore a starting point to meet the needs for cloud factory migration, which incorporates best practices followed for operating and governance models.
So, what is a landing zone?
A landing zone is a configured environment with a standard set of secured cloud infrastructure, policies, best practices, guidelines, and centrally managed services. It is the first step in the cloud migration journey for a factory model application.
Some considerations for building the landing zone include the following:
- AWS account creation: As accounts provide segregation at a high level, we need to define the number of accounts that need to be created. Base the creation of accounts on line of businesses, compliance, and environment within the organization.
- Network configurations: Strategize the creation of networks within the account, VPCs required per account, and connectivity between on-premise and cloud accounts.
- Security: Build foundational pieces for identity and access management to identify individual roles and responsibilities. Standardize hardened machine images, build security policies, install robust network monitoring, and log analytics.
- Automation: Automating the infrastructure creation and implementing standard policies for security, governance, and cost optimization would help improve security, enhance management, and reduce cost.