If I was to sit down and think about one of my main talking points on a day to day with customers is around how using 'the cloud' can improve their security and operational posture. We end up talking about the various pain points that are felt all the time, such as the need to balance flexibility and agility for teams, while ensuring security compliance and avoid configuration creep. This is often a big concern for CISO and Infosec teams alike, as they want to set the business teams up for success, but stay awake at night on what the risks may turn into.
One of the ways to help settle their minds is to use frameworks such as the Azure Enterprise Scale landing zones, that can be governed by robust processes internally to follow a pattern lead security and deployment model.
In this post (which will hopefully become a series), I cover how using such a framework can help minimise technical debt and set you on a path for flexibility, agility in a secure way (well, thats the dream!).
What is a landing zone?
To begin, let's clarify the concept of Azure Enterprise Scale Landing Zones and their benefits. Think of a Landing Zone as a strategic blueprint for deploying services and application in the cloud. It consists of a predefined set of guidelines, tools, and best practices that are designed to assist you in setting up your cloud environment efficiently. This foundation ensures that your cloud infrastructure is secure and prepared to support your business applications and services from the beginning.
Technical debt is a term used to describe the consequences and outcomes when teams make decisions to speed up delivery, only to require some form of (often significant) rework at a later date. It refers to the additional rework costs incurred by choosing quick solutions over better, albeit more time-consuming, approaches.
Azure Enterprise Scale Landing Zones offer a robust architecture from the outset, helping mitigate risks associated with technical debt. The patterns and policies guide teams in setting up cloud environments that are secure, scalable, and easily maintainable, focusing on future growth. This approach helps organisations avoid the pitfalls of makeshift solutions that often lead to security vulnerabilities, system outages, or costly rework.
Robust Governance
From the start, Landing Zones drive the need to introduce robust governance processes, integrating compliance, security, and management best practices. This proactive approach helps organisations avert the disorder that accumulates technical debt. With a strong focus on governance, you can provide a solid foundation for your cloud environment, meticulously addressing all aspects of compliance and security. Pair this with good integration to your operating procedures, teams are able to deploy what they need, knowing the right questions have already been answered.
Uniform Environment Set-Up
One of the advantages of standardising your environment across teams and business units is that it helps to prevent inconsistencies, security risks and inefficiencies at scale. This uniform approach optimises efficiency and reduces the likelihood of accumulating any more technical debt (I know, this is a hard one to believe!). While each environment is built from an approved and well understood pattern, they can be quickly adapted to meet the pressing use case, safe in the knowledge that they are aligned to your IT strategy and security requirements. As requirements change, IT security can quickly evaluate impact without upsetting or breaking production applications.
This certainly makes it less awkward at the all staff social when IT and Development start talking about 'that project'.
Scalability and Versatility
A benefit of the modular design principles of Azure Landing Zones is that it allows for scalable and adaptable changes to the environment without the need for significant restructuring code. Embracing this design methodology helps future-proofs your cloud environment, minimising the risk of security gaps and provides a flexible platform that can be configured to meet the needs of the business.
Whether a new technology, standard or requirement becomes a business priority, teams can quickly deploy the changes and report back on compliance.
In Conclusion
Using adaptable frameworks such as Azure Landing Zones as part of a robust set of governance procedures gives organisations a secure foundation that can be adapted as the business landscape changes. IT security can focus on guidance and compliance, while delivery teams are able to deploy at the pace they need to meet their goals. Technical Debt starts to become manageable as the current state is easily understood, and impact on change can be validated quickly.