As more companies are consolidating their datacenters into the cloud for increased flexibility, accessibility and scalability, AWS has emerged as the biggest player in the space with upwards of 32% market share. But when examining a path to AWS, there’s often terminology that differs from other vendors, such as “landing zone” – what does this term mean?

AWS landing zone definition

AWS defines a landing zone as follows: “AWS landing zone is a solution that helps customers more quickly set up a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices. With the large number of design choices, setting up a multi-account environment can take a significant amount of time, involve the configuration of multiple accounts and services, and require a deep understanding of AWS services. This solution can help save time by automating the set-up of an environment for running secure and scalable workloads while implementing an initial security baseline through the creation of core accounts and resources. It also provides a baseline environment to get started with a multi-account architecture, identity and access management, governance, data security, network design, and logging.”

 

What an AWS landing zone entails

 

With the AWS landing zone acting as the baseline upon which to construct your AWS environment, it therefore becomes the first destination in your cloud migration. It’s designed to be a building block essentially, so that IT staff can outfit their datasets and applications before spinning them up for end users. Here’s an example of a typical AWS environment, built upon an AWS landing zone:

The AWS landing zone also sets the baseline for security optimization, including the following solutions once deployed:

• AWS CloudTrail
• AWS Config
• AWS Config Rules
• AWS Identity and Access Management
• Cross-Account Access
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• AWS landing zone notifications
• Amazon GuardDuty

InterVision always customizes AWS landing zones to meet each client’s requirements, both for the IT team and their wider business.

Preparing for the Cloud Journey

Migrating to AWS takes a lot of planning ahead of the actual transition. From discovery & analysis to foundational planning to the foundation build on the AWS landing zone, legwork is needed to assess the full interdependencies of going to AWS, all before the migration phase.

InterVision recently launched a prescriptive program to assure clients of a successful and reliable cloud journey, called Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance (CMLA). To learn more about this program, reach out to us here.

 

*Image Source: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-landing-zone/