Demystifying Azure Landing Zone with examples and use cases

In simple words Azure Landing Zone is a well prepared azure environment where you will land your workloads. A landing zone is a pre-configured environment that provides a baseline for hosting your workloads in Azure. It is designed to provide a balance between scalability, security, governance, and networking.

What is a Landing Zone?

A landing zone is an environment set up within Azure that includes a set of best practices, services, and Azure resources that work together to meet the needs of your applications and data. It’s essentially a template that you use to ensure your cloud environment is ready to host your workloads securely and efficiently right from the start.

Essentially, the landing zone itself is a (mostly) empty Azure subscription into which we subsequently deploy our application workloads. But, as we’ll see, it's not just about an application subscription. A landing zone deployment can also include those foundational Azure services such as management groups and subscriptions, hybrid network connectivity, logging, and security policies.

 Design Areas of a Landing Zone:

1. Network Topology and Connectivity: Defining the virtual network structure, ensuring connectivity to on-premises datacenters, and setting up network security groups and firewalls.
2. Identity and Access Management: Implementing Azure Active Directory, configuring single sign-on, and ensuring only the right people have access to the right resources.
3. Resource Organization: Structuring resources using management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and tagging strategies for orderly management and billing.
4. Governance and Compliance: Establishing policies and procedures to enforce organizational standards, regulatory compliance, and cost controls.
5. Operations Baseline: Setting up logging, monitoring, and alerting with tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center to keep an eye on system health and security.
6. Data Management: Implementing strategies for data storage, archiving, backup, and recovery, ensuring data is managed according to policies.
7. Compute and Storage Scalability: Planning for how your virtual machines and storage solutions can grow with your workload demands.
8. Automation and DevOps: Integrating tools for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and automated provisioning.

Impact of Design Areas on the Landing Zone:

Each design area contributes to the robustness, scalability, and operational efficiency of the landing zone. They ensure that the cloud environment is secure, manageable, cost-effective, and aligned with business objectives.

Importance of a Landing Zone:

• Security and Compliance: From the start, a landing zone ensures that workloads are secure and compliant with industry regulations.
• Scalability: It allows organizations to scale their environment up or down without having to redesign the architecture.
• Operational Efficiency: Streamlines cloud operations by providing a clear framework for deploying and managing resources.
• Cost Management: Helps avoid unnecessary spending through proper resource management and budgeting tools.

What Could Happen if Not Considered:

• Increased Risk: Without a landing zone, the environment might not be secure, potentially leading to data breaches or other security incidents.
• Compliance Failures: Organizations might inadvertently violate compliance regulations, resulting in fines or legal issues.
• Unstructured Environment: Without a landing zone, resources can become disorganized, making management and monitoring more difficult.
• Inefficiency and Cost Overruns: There may be a lack of operational and cost governance, leading to wasted resources and unexpected expenses.

In essence, a landing zone is crucial because it establishes the necessary groundwork for a successful and secure cloud adoption journey. It sets the stage for your workloads to run in Azure while ensuring that all aspects of your environment are well-governed, compliant, and ready for future growth. Neglecting to establish a landing zone can lead to significant challenges that can undermine the benefits of moving to the cloud.

Design Principles

Before jump into Design Areas lets understand the principles of Design for Azure Landing Zone and the impact of deviating from them. Once we have the proper grasp of the principle then we could dig design areas and keep applying them on principles. So here we have few principles-

• Subscription Democratization
• Policy-driven Governance
• Single Control and Management Plane
• Application-centric service model 
• Alignment With Azure-Native Design & roadmaps

Subscription Democratization

Use subscriptions as units of management, and scale to accelerate application migrations and new application development. 

Align subscriptions with business needs and priorities to support business areas and portfolio owners.

Provide subscriptions to business units to support the design, development, and testing of new workloads and the migration of existing workloads.

Think of Azure subscriptions as individual accounts managed by different departments in a company. This allows each department to control its own Azure services, like having separate budgets for each team.

Example: The marketing team has its own Azure subscription to manage their digital campaigns, separate from the IT department’s subscription.
To help the organization operate effectively at scale, support a subscription with a suitable Management Group hierarchy. This hierarchy allows efficient subscription management and organization.

Impact of deviation from Subscription Democratization

·       Decentralized vs. centralized operations. One way to implement this principle transitions operations to business units and workload teams. This reassignment lets workload owners have more control and autonomy over their workloads, within the guardrails of the platform foundation.

Organizations that require central operations might not want to delegate control of production environments to workload teams or business units. These organizations might need to modify their resource organization design to deviate from this principle.

Policy-driven governance

Use Azure Policy to provide guardrails and ensure that the applications you deploy comply with your organization's platform.

Use Azure policies as a set of rules to make sure all Azure services follow the company's standards. It's like setting house rules that everyone in the family must follow.

·       Example: A policy could be that all data stored in Azure must be encrypted for security.

·       Impact of Deviation: 

Increased Management Overhead: Without these policies, managing compliance becomes more complex and time-consuming. Azure Policy helps you restrict and automate your desired compliance state within your environment like no resource will be deployed without specify tags .

Single control and management plane

Use a single system to control and monitor all Azure services. It’s like having one remote control for all the electronic devices in your home.

It's best to have a consistent experience for both central operations and workload operations. Azure provides a unified and consistent control plane that applies across all Azure resources and provisioning channels.

The control plane is subject to role-based access and policy-driven controls. You can use this Azure control plane to establish a standardized set of policies and controls that govern your entire enterprise estate.

·       Impact of Deviation:

·       Integration Complexity: Using multiple systems or third-party tools can make things more complicated and prone to errors.

 

Application-centric service model

Focus on moving and building applications in Azure in a way that suits both old and new apps. Don’t just move them as they are (like moving furniture from one house to another), but adapt them to fit the new environment.

Focus on application-centric migrations and development, rather than pure infrastructure lift-and-shift migrations such as moving virtual machines.

Regardless of the service model, strive to provide a secure environment for all applications you deploy on the Azure platform.

Impact of Deviation

·       Increased governance policy complexity. If you segment workloads differently from the management group hierarchy implementation options, you increase complexity in governance policies and access control structures that govern your environment. Examples include deviation from the organizational hierarchy structure or grouping by Azure service.
·       Increased operational overhead. This tradeoff introduces the risk of unintentional policy duplication and exceptions, which add to operational and management overheads.
·       Dev/Test/Production is another common approach that organizations consider. For more information, different services hosting in different env, need different policies.   

 Alignment with Azure-native design and roadmaps

 Use Azure’s own services and keep up-to-date with its new features and plans. It's like using the latest features of your smartphone to get the best experience.

  Example: Using Azure’s latest database services for better performance instead of sticking with older, less efficient solutions.

Impact of Deviation:   Integration Complexity: Relying on non-Azure solutions may lead to challenges in integrating and keeping up with Azure updates.

 

Design Areas of Landing Zone

As per above discussion we have understood the basic principles of Landing Zone design and there impacts , now its time to explore the various design areas of the landing zone.

let's delve into specific design areas of a landing zone and examine how they impact the landing zone.

1. Network Topology and Connectivity

Impact on the Landing Zone:

• Security Posture: The way you design your network topology within the landing zone has a direct impact on the security of your cloud environment. For instance, the implementation of subnets and network security groups (NSGs) determines how traffic is segmented and controlled, significantly affecting the isolation and protection of different workloads.
• Connectivity: Establishing connectivity with on-premises networks via ExpressRoute or VPN affects performance and reliability. The design choices will impact how smoothly and securely hybrid environments function.
• Scalability and Flexibility: A well-designed network topology allows for future growth. For example, implementing a hub-and-spoke network architecture can enable you to easily add new spokes (workloads) without redesigning the entire network.

Example:

Imagine a scenario where a company is moving its on-premises applications to Azure. They might set up a landing zone with a hub-and-spoke topology, where the hub is the central point of connectivity to the on-premises data center and the spokes are individual Azure Virtual Networks that host the applications. By using NSGs and Azure Firewall, they ensure secure traffic flow between the on-premises data center and Azure, as well as between the different application workloads.

2. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Impact on the Landing Zone:

• Access Control: IAM is fundamental in determining who has access to what within the landing zone. By setting up Azure Active Directory and assigning roles based on the principle of least privilege, you control access to resources, data, and functionality, thereby enhancing the security of the landing zone.
• Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): By enabling SSO and MFA, you improve user experience and security, which are crucial for maintaining a secure landing zone. SSO facilitates ease of access across applications while MFA adds an additional layer of security.
• Audit and Compliance: Proper IAM implementation in a landing zone allows for detailed logging and reporting of user actions, which is critical for auditing and regulatory compliance.

Example:

Consider an e-commerce company that wants to ensure its developers have access to necessary resources without compromising security. In its landing zone, it sets up Azure Active Directory, integrates it with their existing on-premises directory, and uses group memberships to grant appropriate permissions to resources. They enable MFA for an additional layer of security, given the sensitive nature of transaction data. They also implement conditional access policies to restrict certain actions to be performed only within the secure on-premises network.

In both of these examples, the design decisions in network topology and IAM significantly impact the functionality, security, and efficiency of the landing zone. These design areas are critical to ensure that the landing zone provides a solid and secure foundation for hosting workloads in Azure.

3. Resource Organization

Impact on the Landing Zone:

• Clarity and Structure: How resources are organized within a landing zone impacts the clarity with which teams can navigate and manage Azure resources. It affects everything from billing to management and operations.
• Resource Management and Automation: Effective resource organization enables better automation with consistent naming conventions, tagging strategies, and resource grouping. This can lead to more streamlined deployment and management processes.

Examples:

• Example 1: A multinational corporation organizes its resources by geography, using different subscriptions for different regions. Within each subscription, it uses resource groups to separate production environments from development and testing environments. This organization simplifies management and cost tracking across different environments and regions.
• Example 2: A SaaS provider uses Azure Policy to enforce naming conventions and tags for resources at the time of creation. This enables them to automate governance and ensure that the billing for resources can be accurately attributed to the correct teams and projects.

4. Governance and Compliance

Impact on the Landing Zone:

• Policy Enforcement: The application of governance controls impacts how well policies and compliance requirements are enforced across the landing zone. It influences operational consistency and ensures that compliance is not an afterthought.
• Risk Management: Good governance within a landing zone helps identify and mitigate risks associated with cost, security, performance, and compliance.

Examples:

• Example 1: A healthcare company needs to comply with HIPAA regulations. In its landing zone, it uses Azure Blueprints to define a repeatable set of governance tools and Azure resources that include configurations for HIPAA. This ensures that every part of its infrastructure is compliant by design, thus minimizing the risk of violations.
• Example 2: An online retailer uses Azure Cost Management and Budgets within their landing zone to set spending limits and track usage against budgets. They apply Azure Policies to prevent the creation of overly expensive resources and monitor compliance with their cost-saving measures.

By carefully considering these design areas when setting up a landing zone, organizations can create a well-structured, governed, and compliant environment that reduces operational risk, promotes efficiency, and supports scalable growth. These aspects are critical to maintaining a healthy and manageable cloud footprint in Azure.

5. Operations Baseline

Impact on the Landing Zone:

• Monitoring and Management: An operations baseline impacts the ability to monitor the health and performance of the environment effectively, which is critical for maintaining service availability and reliability.
• Security and Compliance: It also affects security by ensuring that any unusual activity is detected and addressed promptly, maintaining the integrity of the landing zone.

Examples:

• Example 1: A fintech company uses Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center in their landing zone to keep an eye on system performance and security. They set up alerts for suspicious activities and performance degradation, which enables them to respond quickly to potential issues.
• Example 2: An online gaming platform implements a baseline of Azure Log Analytics and Azure Application Insights for their landing zone to gather detailed telemetry and logs. This helps them to troubleshoot issues rapidly, ensuring a high-quality user experience.

6. Data Management

Impact on the Landing Zone:

• Data Lifecycle: The approach to data management in a landing zone affects how data is stored, accessed, protected, and archived, impacting the entire data lifecycle.
• Compliance and Security: It also determines how well data is protected and how easily the organization can comply with data governance and regulatory requirements.

Examples:

• Example 1: An e-commerce company leverages Azure Blob Storage for unstructured data and Azure SQL Database for structured data in their landing zone. They implement lifecycle management policies to automatically transition older data to cooler storage and eventually to archival storage, optimizing costs.
• Example 2: A pharmaceutical company uses Azure Data Lake Storage to store large datasets and Azure Databricks for big data analytics. They configure data retention policies and encryption to maintain compliance with industry regulations on data security.

7. Compute and Storage Scalability

Impact on the Landing Zone:

• Resource Elasticity: The scalability design impacts how well the landing zone can accommodate growth in demand without service disruption or performance degradation.
• Cost Optimization: It affects the ability to optimize costs by scaling resources up or down based on actual demand, rather than over-provisioning.

Examples:

• Example 1: A media company experiences variable demand for their streaming service. In their landing zone, they use Azure Auto Scale to automatically adjust the number of VM instances serving their application. This ensures they can handle peak loads while minimizing costs during off-peak times.
• Example 2: A seasonal business uses Azure Table Storage for their order processing system with a throughput that automatically scales with demand. During off-peak months, they reduce throughput to minimize costs.

8. Automation and DevOps

Impact on the Landing Zone:

• Deployment Consistency: Automation within a landing zone ensures consistent and repeatable deployments, which is essential for maintaining quality and reducing errors.
• Operational Efficiency: It enables faster deployments and operations, as manual, repetitive tasks are reduced, leading to higher operational efficiency.

Examples:

• Example 1: A software development company employs Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Azure Resource Manager templates in their landing zone. This allows them to automate the provisioning and management of their infrastructure, ensuring consistency across development, testing, and production environments.
• Example 2: A retail chain integrates Azure DevOps in their landing zone for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. This allows them to automate their code deployment process, enabling frequent and reliable application updates.

In all these design areas, the impact on the landing zone revolves around setting up an environment that is efficient, secure, compliant, and able to adapt to changing business needs. Proper consideration of these aspects during the design phase of a landing zone ensures a smoother cloud journey and a more robust operational stance in the long term.

Operating Model

Now its time to understand one more thing which has a direct impact on the Landing Zone that's is How organization is Operating so lets try understand the operating model first and then its impact on the entire landing zone.

An operating model in the context of cloud computing describes how an organization runs its IT operations to support and deliver services, particularly when these services are hosted in the cloud. It encompasses people, processes, and technologies that enable the business to function efficiently and effectively.

In Simple Terms: Imagine a restaurant. Its operating model includes the roles of chefs, waiters, the menu (services offered), kitchen equipment (technology), and how they serve customers (processes). Similarly, a cloud operating model outlines how a team interacts with cloud services, the tools they use, and the procedures they follow to deliver and manage those services.

Examples of Operating Models:

1. Centralized IT: A single IT department manages all cloud services and resources. This is like a central kitchen that prepares food for various outlets; everything is controlled and consistent.
2. Decentralized IT: Different departments or teams manage their own cloud resources independently. This is like each outlet having its own kitchen and creating its own menu.
3. Hybrid IT: A combination of both centralized and decentralized models, where the central IT provides governance and some common services, and individual teams have flexibility over specific services. This could be compared to a franchise restaurant model where the franchisee has some autonomy but also adheres to standards set by the franchise brand.

Impact on Azure Landing Zone: An Azure Landing Zone is a set of guidelines and resources for setting up a cloud environment. The operating model impacts the design of the Landing Zone in several areas:

1. Governance and Compliance:
• In a centralized model, governance might be strict and uniform across all cloud projects.
• In a decentralized model, governance might be more flexible but needs to ensure minimum standards are met.
2. Networking:
• A centralized model might have a highly controlled network setup with strict access controls.
• A decentralized model might allow teams to set up their own network configurations within certain parameters.
3. Identity and Access Management (IAM):
• Centralized models might use a single, uniform IAM strategy across the entire organization.
• Decentralized models could allow individual teams to manage their own IAM, leading to a diverse set of strategies.
4. Resource Organization (Management Groups, Subscriptions, Resource Groups):
• In a centralized model, resources may be organized according to the organizational structure and controlled centrally.
• In a decentralized model, each team might have its own subscription and resource group that they manage independently.
5. Cost Management:
• Centralized IT might pool all cloud costs and allocate budgets to different teams.
• Decentralized IT allows teams to have their own budgets and manage their own costs, which might lead to different spending patterns.

Example of Impact: Let's say a company has a centralized operating model, and they are implementing a new Azure Landing Zone. The central IT team will design the Landing Zone to have strict policies, a centralized subscription model, and centralized logging and monitoring to maintain control over the environment.

Conversely, if the company has a decentralized operating model, the Landing Zone design might include multiple subscriptions managed by respective teams, with more lenient policies that provide teams the autonomy to innovate and experiment while still adhering to certain corporate-wide standards.

In summary, the operating model dictates how the Azure Landing Zone should be structured to support the business's operational efficiency, risk management, and service delivery objectives. Each operating model brings different requirements and challenges to the Landing Zone's design, influencing how cloud resources are managed, monitored, and governed.

Designing an Azure landing zone involves understanding the client's requirements across various domains. A landing zone is a segment of your Azure environment that has been pre-provisioned by your cloud operations team to provide your application teams with the resources they need to support their services. Below is a set of questions across different design areas to help you capture the necessary requirements for an Azure landing zone:

1. Identity and Access Management

Question: How do you currently manage identities and access for cloud resources, and do you require integration with any on-premises identity providers like Active Directory?

Impact: This will determine how Azure Active Directory (AAD) is set up, whether you'll need Azure AD Connect for synchronization, and what kind of identity and access policies are required, including multi-factor authentication and conditional access.

2. Network Design

Question: What are your networking requirements, including on-premises to Azure connectivity, and how do you plan to segment your network for different workloads?

Impact: This informs the setup of the Azure Virtual Network, network security groups, VPN Gateway/ExpressRoute for connectivity, and how traffic will be routed and filtered.

3. Resource Organization

Question: What is your preferred method for organizing resources (e.g., by environment, application, department), and what naming conventions do you adhere to?

Impact: This affects how resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups are structured and the governance model for enforcing policies and compliance.

4. Subscription Strategy

Question: Will you have a single subscription for all your Azure workloads, or do you require multiple subscriptions for billing or organizational purposes?

Impact: This guides the strategy for allocation of resources to subscriptions and how they are managed, including cost management and billing.

5. Compliance and Governance

Question: What are your compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA), and how do you plan to monitor and enforce compliance in your Azure environment?

Impact: This will shape the implementation of Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, and other governance tools to ensure compliance and governance standards are met.

6. Security Baseline

Question: What security baselines and benchmarks (e.g., CIS, NIST) does your organization follow, and what level of security do you need for different types of workloads?

Impact: The answers dictate the security measures to be implemented, such as Azure Security Center, Azure Firewall, and network security groups.

7. Operations and Monitoring

Question: How do you plan to monitor and manage your Azure resources, and what tooling do you currently use for on-premises resources?

Impact: This informs the setup of Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, and integration with any existing tools like System Center Operations Manager for a unified operations strategy.

8. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Question: What are your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) targets, and do you require multi-region deployments for high availability?

Impact: These requirements will influence the design of the landing zone's backup and disaster recovery solutions, such as Azure Site Recovery and geo-redundant storage.

9. Data Management

Question: What is your data classification policy, and what types of data will you be hosting in Azure (e.g., PII, PHI)?

Impact: This determines how data is stored, encrypted, and accessed, and which Azure data services (like Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage) are appropriate.

10. Cost Management

Question: What budget constraints do you have for your cloud resources, and how would you like to track and optimize cloud spending?

Impact: This affects how cost management and analysis tools (like Azure Cost Management + Billing) are set up, as well as the implementation of spending limits and alerts.

11. DevOps Practices

Question: What is your current DevOps maturity level, and how do you manage your application lifecycle (e.g., CI/CD pipelines)?

Impact: The response helps in designing the Azure DevOps environment, including setting up project structures, repositories, build and release pipelines, and integration with existing tools.

12. Scalability and Performance

Question: What are your performance and scalability requirements, and do you expect any variable or peak loads for your applications?

Impact: This will affect the design of the landing zone in terms of selecting the right VM sizes, auto-scaling settings, and load-balancing options.

By thoroughly addressing these questions, you can ensure that the Azure landing zone is tailored to meet the customer's specific needs, providing a robust foundation for their cloud initiatives. Each question leads to critical decisions that will impact the design and functionality of the landing zone, aligning with the customer's business goals, technical requirements, and compliance obligations.

Now once we have all the Design principles followed and work on proper design areas. We have below Enterprise Landing zone which is consists of platform landing zones and application landing zones. As explained below:

Platform landing zone: A platform landing zone is a subscription that provides shared services (identity, connectivity, management) to applications in application landing zones.

•  Consolidating these shared services often improves operational efficiency. 

• One or more central teams manage the platform landing zones. In the conceptual architecture (see figure 1), the "Identity subscription", "Management subscription", and "Connectivity subscription" represent three different platform landing zones.

• The conceptual architecture shows these three platform landing zones in detail. It depicts representative resources and policies applied to each platform landing zone.

Application landing zone: An application landing zone is a subscription for hosting an application. 

• You pre-provision application landing zones through code and use management groups to assign policy controls to them.

•  In the conceptual architecture (see figure 1), the "Landing zone A1 subscription" and "Landing zone A2 subscription" represent two different application landing zones. 

• The conceptual architecture shows only the "Landing zone A2 subscription" in detail. It depicts representative resources and policies applied to the application landing zone.

Hypothetical Scenario: Globex Enterprises

hypothetical scenario for a large multinational corporation, "Globex Enterprises," planning to migrate and expand their IT infrastructure to Azure. They need a robust, scalable, and secure environment - an enterprise-scale Azure Landing Zone (ALZ) is an ideal solution for them.

Objective:

Globex Enterprises aims to migrate its diverse set of applications, including legacy systems, SaaS products, and modern cloud-native apps, to Azure. They also plan to develop new solutions leveraging Azure's capabilities. Their goals are to ensure scalability, security, compliance with international regulations, and efficient resource management.

Components of the Enterprise-Scale Azure Landing Zone:

1. Core Infrastructure Setup

• Azure Hub-Spoke Network Topology:
• Use: To create a scalable and secure network architecture.
• Reason: This model separates concerns by isolating workloads in different spokes, while the hub controls and manages shared services like network connectivity and security.
• Azure Virtual WAN or ExpressRoute:
• Use: For robust and reliable connectivity between on-premises data centers and Azure.
• Reason: To support Globex’s high bandwidth requirements and provide a private, secure connection to Azure.

2. Identity and Access Management

• Azure Active Directory (AD):
• Use: For centralized identity management.
• Reason: To manage user identities and access across their global enterprise, integrating with existing on-premises AD.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Azure AD Privileged Identity Management:
• Use: To control access to Azure resources.
• Reason: To ensure that users have only the access they need, minimizing security risks.

3. Resource Organization and Management

• Management Groups, Subscriptions, and Resource Groups:
• Use: To organize resources.
• Reason: This hierarchical structure enables effective management, governance, and compliance at different levels (enterprise, departmental, project).
• Azure Policy and Blueprints:
• Use: For governance and compliance.
• Reason: To enforce organizational standards and regulatory compliance across all Azure resources.

4. Security and Compliance

• MS defender and Azure Sentinel:
• Use: For unified security management and threat protection.
• Reason: To provide advanced threat detection, security posture management, and SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) capabilities.
• Network Security Groups (NSGs) and Azure Firewall:
• Use: To protect the network.
• Reason: To control inbound and outbound traffic to Azure resources and protect against threats.

5. Operations and Monitoring

• Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics:
• Use: For monitoring the health and performance of applications and infrastructure.
• Reason: To track operational health, performance metrics, and logs, ensuring proactive issue resolution.
• Azure Automation and Azure Site Recovery:
• Use: For automation and disaster recovery.
• Reason: To automate repetitive tasks and ensure business continuity in case of disasters.

6. Data Management and Storage

• Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Blob Storage:
• Use: To manage structured and unstructured data.
• Reason: To provide scalable, high-performance data storage solutions tailored to Globex’s diverse data needs.
• Azure Data Lake and Azure HDInsight:
• Use: For big data analytics and storage.
• Reason: To support advanced analytics requirements and store large volumes of data in a scalable data lake.

7. Application and Compute

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Functions, and App Services:
• Use: For hosting various types of applications (containers, serverless, web apps).
• Reason: To provide a range of compute options to support Globex’s diverse application portfolio.

8. Connectivity and Integration

• Azure API Management and Azure Logic Apps:
• Use: To manage APIs and integration workflows.
• Reason: To securely expose services and create automated workflows between applications and services, both in Azure and on-premises.

9. DevOps and CI/CD

• Azure DevOps and GitHub:
• Use: For source control, CI/CD, and application lifecycle management.
• Reason: To support Globex’s DevOps practices, enabling efficient deployment and management of applications.

Conclusion:

In this enterprise-scale Azure Landing Zone, Globex Enterprises can efficiently manage its vast array of services and resources in Azure. This solution provides a comprehensive, secure, and scalable environment that supports current and future business needs, aligns with industry best practices, and adheres to strict compliance and governance standards.

Below is a structured questionnaire that covers multiple design domains:

Organization and Project Information

1. Can you provide an overview of your organization and the nature of your work?
2. What are the primary objectives for your Azure cloud adoption?
3. Who are the primary stakeholders for this Azure deployment?

Identity and Access Management

4. Do you have existing identity management systems, like Active Directory, that need to be integrated with Azure?
5. What are your requirements for identity federation, single sign-on, and multi-factor authentication?

Network Design

6. What is your current on-premises network architecture?
7. Do you have any specific requirements for network isolation, segmentation, or special connectivity (such as ExpressRoute)?
8. What are your requirements for internet connectivity and egress control?

Resource Organization

9. How do you envision organizing your resources in Azure (by department, function, environment, etc.)?
10. Do you have existing naming conventions and resource tagging strategies that should be applied in Azure?

Subscription Strategy

11. How many Azure subscriptions do you anticipate needing?
12. What is your strategy for subscription management and governance?

Compliance and Governance

13. What regulatory compliance standards are you required to meet?
14. What governance mechanisms do you wish to implement (e.g., Azure Policy, Management Groups, Resource Locks)?

Security Baseline

15. What security frameworks or standards do you follow?
16. Are there specific security tools or features you want to use within Azure (e.g., Azure Firewall, Sentinel)?

Operations and Monitoring

17. What are your requirements for monitoring, logging, and alerting?
18. Do you have an existing SIEM or monitoring tools that need to be integrated with Azure?

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

19. What are your disaster recovery and business continuity plans?
20. What are your RTO and RPO targets?

Data Management

21. What types of data will be stored in Azure, and what are the data sovereignty requirements?
22. Do you have data retention and encryption needs?

Cost Management

23. What is your budget for cloud spending?
24. How do you plan to track and optimize your Azure costs?

DevOps Practices

25. Can you describe your current development and deployment processes?
26. Do you use any CI/CD tools that need to be integrated with Azure DevOps?

Scalability and Performance

27. What are your performance expectations for your Azure-based applications?
28. Do you anticipate any seasonal or event-driven scaling requirements?

Application and Workload

29. Can you list the applications and workloads you plan to move to or deploy in Azure?
30. Do you have any specific architectural requirements for these applications (e.g., microservices, serverless)?

Interoperability and Dependencies

31. Are there any dependencies on external systems or data sources that need to be considered?
32. Do you require hybrid cloud capabilities, and how do you envision the interaction between on-premises and cloud environments?

Migration and Transition

33. Do you have a timeline for migrating existing applications to Azure?
34. What is your approach to cloud migration (e.g., rehosting, refactoring, rewriting)?

Training and Change Management

35. What is the level of cloud proficiency among your IT staff?
36. Do you need Azure training or certification programs for your team?

Support and SLAs

37. What are your expectations for support response times and service level agreements?
38. Are there any critical business processes that require enhanced support levels?

This comprehensive questionnaire will help you gather the necessary information to create an Azure landing zone that aligns with your customer's technical requirements, compliance standards, operational practices, and business objectives. Each question helps to clarify a specific aspect of the Azure deployment, ensuring that all critical considerations are addressed in the design of the landing zone.