Embarking on the cloud journey brings its own challenges in cloud management, most organizations require a different environment depending on business needs for better visibility, maintenance compliance and knowledge the cost of operations.
The cloud is the backbone and foundation of digital transformation in its many forms. Cloud is essential for businesses to deliver an exceptional user experience and put businesses on the fast track, cloud native digital transformation enables superior flexibility when businesses undertake this process.
Embarking on the cloud journey brings its own challenges in cloud management, most organizations require a different environment depending on business needs, which not only complicates the configuration of cloud workloads , but also the management of these workloads and services.
How does the business then manage this complex multi-account environment, there is need for a framework that can help large-scale cloud adoption in an efficient and streamlined way, this concept that cloud providers call as a landing zone that has a preconfigured environment with a standard set of secure cloud infrastructure, policies, best practices, guidelines, and centrally managed services.
Cloud Landing Zone identifies critical actions and goals that will systematically improve enterprise cloud journeys. The purpose of a cloud landing zone is to put in place safeguards that allow you to integrate different teams and applications and distribute them across multiple accounts so that workloads are secure and isolated and that security controls are centrally managed.
Let’s see what are the challenges of not having a framework in companies
- The unified security policy is not applied to all workloads, leading to compliance issues and security risks.
- If resource tagging is not done properly, billing and monitoring will be difficult and cost allocation will have an impact.
- Data security breach without clear protection policy.
- Lack of control over the development and production environment which required different policies for workload protection.
What benefits will landing zones bring to the business.
- Corporate and Multi-Tenant Registration
Cloud adoption requires subscribing to one of the cloud providers’ models and following the management of tracking subscriptions which is a multi-faceted operation that must be managed efficiently and accurately produces long-term benefits for the companies in terms of cost management and efficient use of cloud, inefficiency will have skyrocketed operating costs, which doubts that the cloud is really profitable. The organization can have distributed enrollment for different environments with a clearly defined mandatory corporate policy that applies centrally to all tenants, this ensures that there are no breaches and that critical data in cloud are protected, the business will need multiple tenants to simulate the customer environment for development and testing. can be isolated with different policy requirements. The cloud offers great flexibility to meet such requirements for businesses.
- Centralize identity access management.
Centralizing IAM for enterprises is a cost-effective solution to verify user identities and allow them to access only the resources they need, this integrated with multi-factor authentication provides additional protection, IAM provides separate roles and responsibilities in depending on the workload and resources, different environment can be protected according to the policy defined by the centralized protection policy, IAM allows to have transparent access to different SaaS applications, modern application hosted on cloud providers , it can also consolidate the identity of multiple IAMs to provide access to modern applications from the centralized user identity.
- Management groups and multi-account organization
Cloud providers allow access to resources through a structure called management groups, which is a simple yet powerful way to help manage access in a cloud environment. These also use blueprints to automatically create different instances and policy is enforced based on corporate compliance and operational needs. When the organization is large, it is necessary to create several accounts for business and IT departments.
This is crucial to ensure that production data used by employee engagement is separated from business unit use for data protection, compliance, and accessibility. The framework defined may have a standard policy for multiple accounts based on roles and responsibilities.
- Network topology and connectivity
Applications are vital to modern business operations and the network plays a fundamentally important connectivity role to and between application portfolios hosted in hybrid environments. An agile programmable intelligent infrastructure comprising platforms and networks enables the rapid deployment of applications and the performance needed for seamless digital experiences. This helps you optimize performance benchmarks for price, scale, speed, and productivity across multiple clouds.
Businesses demand continuous access to applications. The construction of the network, which was limited to the corporate network, has not exceeded the limits, which requires revamping the connectivity solutions such as fast connections, sdwan, virtual wan, cross connections to meet these demands commercial.
- Centralized management and monitoring
As enterprises move to the cloud and modernize applications to meet customer demands, it is also essential to effectively monitor cloud workloads, its non-negotiable necessity, better visibility and control over key metrics. , logs and streams. This is especially important because public clouds are more likely to incur unexpected costs due to poor visibility. Monitoring improves security posture and maintains ideal application performance.
- Unified business continuity and disaster plan
Business continuity is the ability of businesses to stay online and provide services during disruptive events, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, and telecommunications outages. It is important to identify business disruptions such as threat analysis, cyberattacks, natural disasters, misconfigurations.
Clearly defined process on how to transition to BCP/DR when it occurs, the plan should have a checklist of critical actions to perform and do a simulation once every six months as part of this process, it also ensures that during the outage the system will return fully accessible to the customer, simulation identifies gaps in process applications and configuration changes required in the patch cycle, it is important to maintain production and BCP/DR synchronized at all times.
- Security, governance and compliance
The cloud is open to public access for deployed resources for application access, which poses a cyberattack and heightened threat landscape, attackers can use this route to compromise the network and perform destruction and theft of data that can impact company reputation and financial impact.
Governance, risk and compliance enable the organization to establish cybersecurity maturity across the organization, this practice identifies gap analysis, compliance status of workloads across the cloud, cybersecurity readiness, security practices and control room for a centralized view of security is difficult for a large organization Due to the complexity of the business, GRC is the collective responsibility of each team that has a business connection, this top priority for the team to maintain the level of security and compliance required for business continuity.
- Platform automation and Devops
Automation has a critical role to play in the modern enterprise, its key technology trend to adopt to deliver value to customers, businesses must adapt quickly in an ever-changing landscape. They must perform network or application configurations and scale their systems as needed.
Resources must increase or decrease to meet demand or respond to failure, such a rapid rate of change can only be accomplished through a specialized automation platform devops plays a critical role in streamlining of the automation process, there are cloud-native automation or specialized automation tools available that can help deliver these services. Cloud orchestration makes it possible to onboard, manage, and deploy network devices, virtual machines, and routers efficiently and quickly.
Conclusion:
As enterprises adopt cloud technology based on business requirements and complexity, they can use the multi-account environment to help them plan their cloud infrastructure. There is a need for a framework that meets infrastructure, compliance, governance, and security requirements while enabling organizations to evolve and change their environments in response to changing business demands. The cloud is not a complex environment, but the perspective needs to change on how the environment can be simplified for use and ensure operations are cost efficient for businesses.
The cloud was managed through a single account, such as development, testing, staging, and production. The issue of having to manage multiple environments within a single account is a cause for concern if security is not managed properly. Another disadvantage is the lack of scalability, flexibility to integrate new teams and applications, and the lack of centralized control and monitoring.
A landing zone lets you quickly set up a cloud environment using automation, including configuration best practices for security, so you can focus on your core business.
The author is director – IT at Capgemini India.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and ETCIO.com does not necessarily endorse them. ETCIO.com will not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.
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