>> Hey everybody. Stay tuned,
where Brian and I will be talking to you about what landing zones
are and why they can actually be
beneficial to you on your Cloud adoption journey.
[MUSIC]
>> Welcome to the Azure Enablement Show.
In this show, we're talking to Microsoft experts to tackle some of
those technical conversations and questions
you might have around your Cloud adoption journey.
I know in previous episodes we talked about
the Cloud Adoption Framework and
how it can help you with your Cloud adoption journey.
We also heard about landing zones,
which are part of that Cloud Adoption Framework.
Today, joining me to talk more about landing zones is Brian.
Brian, thank you for coming on the show.
>> Hey, Sarah. Thanks for having me.
>> Awesome. These landing zones,
what are they and why do we have them, Brian?
>> That's a great question. Landing zones are
our way to help customers
prepare for what they want to do on the Cloud.
There's a lot of things you can do in
the Cloud and a lot of ways you can get there.
But what we've seen is that when customers have
a successful environmental configuration from the beginning,
they're more likely to be successful with whatever they do.
Azure landing zones help the customers set up
that initial Azure environment and consider things like scale,
security, governance, and identity.
It helps them prepare for their migration
or for building out net new solutions,
and also helps make sure that they've considered
all the different platforming sources because customers
oftentimes don't know what is or isn't available in the Cloud.
It also helps really establish a platform that can allow you to
do things with an IaaS migration or VM deployments,
or skill all the way out to
net new PaaS environments without having
to really change your environmental configuration.
>> Okay. That clears that up.
However, I'm thinking about every customer is unique,
they have different set ups,
they have different ways of modeling in their environment,
how do landing zones fit in if every customer's different?
>> That's a great question. Every landing zone
may end up being a little bit different.
But what we're seeing is that landing zones
all share a set of common design areas.
If we factor in those design areas when building the landing zone,
you're more likely to have
that successful environmental configuration.
All of the Azure landing zones that we provide
consider eight different design areas.
The first one being your enterprise enrollment and how you think
about buying Azure or setting up that basic foundation.
Then we start to look at Identity and how do you want to set up
access so you can actually get into the Cloud and do things.
Or resource organization, which is how we figure out the best way
to organize things inside of
the Cloud so that they're easily managed and governed.
Once you start to point things,
one of the most important things to consider
is network topology and connectivity.
How you want things to be isolated and connected,
and how do you want to reach back to on-prem.
Then looking beyond that, as we start to
get into the operational side of things,
we have to consider what
your business continuity and disaster recovery plan,
or how do you govern your environments,
how do you deploy things and ultimately,
how do you make sure you have a sound operations baseline.
The answers to each of these considerations
vary depending on the customer and their operating model,
but the questions always tend to be the same.
We design each Azure landing zone around
those eight design areas and build from there.
>> Okay. I'm starting to get
a real clear picture of what these landing zones are.
Why should people invest in doing landing zone?
They sound helpful, but what are
the real benefits to them instead of just
going off on their own and getting their own landing zone as such?
>> That's a great question. All of
these design areas you can build out on your own,
and you don't need any of the automated tools
that we have in Azure landing zones.
It's just configuration of an environment.
But what we see when you use the landing zones is that you
start with a lot of these questions
answered or at least a certain section of them.
By starting with defined answers to those considerations,
you're able to better align your business priorities,
it's easier to figure out
the different Cloud design considerations,
makes it easier to be ready for
Cloud applications and adapt and grow as you go,
and ultimately gives you agility,
cutting-edge innovation, and the ability to securely deploy while
still adapting to your Cloud
operating model so that you can fit with your future growth plans.
>> Okay. You mentioned a phrase there that I'm not
a 100 percent sure about what it means, operating models.
Brian, what are they?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
If you exclude the Cloud from the conversation,
every IT organization has some sort of operating model,
it's how do you think about the way you
want to run your IT business?
Well, the same is true for the Cloud.
You need an operating model to understand
what you're really trying to accomplish.
We've studied thousands of customers that are
operating in the Cloud to figure out what's working,
what's not working so well,
and how do they really organize for success?
What we've seen from that is a group of
four different operating models that we've seen
consistently show up customer after customer.
What we found is that if you start with
a sound foundation and operations,
you can do whatever you want in the Cloud
and then it's easier to do.
We've broken up operations in four key operating models.
The first thing we look at is decentralized operations.
This is for customers where
the whole world centers around a single workload or
one workload at a time and you'll
see workload operations at the center of everything you do.
Not a whole lot of centralization,
but tons of room for innovation.
Then we see customers who invest in more of a traditional model,
which is a central operations model.
In central operations, you tend to
have a group of central IT people that
control access to all production environments
and they're the only ones that can get in.
So if you're building a new app,
you have to go through them for approval,
review, governance, security,
all of those things before they permit
the release of that product into an environment they manage.
Now what we're seeing is a really strong growing trend
is enterprise operations.
This is something that's new and freshly enabled by the Cloud.
In the Cloud, you can create a platform foundation that has
all common utilities that are shared
between workloads and environments.
But then build up distinct landing zones or distinct environments,
some that are purpose-built for stable,
steady state workloads that you want a lot
of control and governance and compliance,
others where you have a little bit less of a guard rail
and you give more freedom to innovate and do new things.
So it breaks up that ability to really take
control of what you're pushing out
to the Cloud for workload teams.
Then finally, distributed operations
is one that we see pretty consistently with
larger customers where they have
multiple different teams and mixtures of operating models,
and they're trying to bring those all together and
integrate those different operating models into one.
These are the four models we see,
and each of those share some pretty common characteristics.
But ultimately, the further to the right you go,
the more complex your environment is.
>> Thank you for clearing the up there.
When we're thinking back to the landing zones,
if that's okay we can go back to them.
If Azure is changing and constantly adding functionalities,
how do we keep up the landing zones,
do we as customers have to add all these new products and
functionality to the landing zones or
does Microsoft look after that for us?
>> That's a great question.
In each of the Azure landing zones,
we work on integrating
the newest features that are available in the Azure once they're
proven and tested with customers so that we
can keep those landing zone options up to date,
fresh, and reflecting those new technologies.
Now as a customer, you still have to decide if you want to
incorporate those new changes and if they're going to add value.
But by starting with a standardize Azure landing zone,
you can compare those releases and find out what new features do,
what they add to the value of your environment,
and decide whether or not you want to pull
those in as part of your foundation.
It makes it really easy for you to pick
a common path and then as things evolve,
be able to integrate new features as they come online.
>> Cool. I'm starting to get
a real clear picture of what landing zones are.
Where's the best place to get started if I want to start
using landing zones and thinking
about them for my environment, Brian?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
The ready methodology inside of
the Cloud Adoption Framework is the home
for all of the Azure landing zones.
This is the best starting point for anyone.
Inside of the ready methodology,
there are four basic steps that you can
follow to get going with landing zones.
The first is take a look at the Azure setup guide.
That setup guide is a primer on the tools and the approaches and
the things you need to know to just be
familiar with what landing zones do.
Then the next step is choose your first landing zone.
It could be a very robust enterprise-scale landing zone,
or it could be one of the smaller,
start small, and expand landing zone options.
But either way, choose one in your environment, get it deployed,
take a look at it firsthand so you can see,
does that give you the operational capabilities you need?
As you get more familiar with that or other landing zones,
you'll start to see how you want to expand
those landing zones to meet
your business and technical requirements.
That's step 3 is start to expand
those either through the portal or through infrastructures code.
Then step 4, throughout the ready methodology,
there's a number of best practices that focus on
how to expand landing zones and how to add in
things like network decisions or
identity decisions to be able to add in
additional features above and beyond that landing zone,
to really customize it to meet your needs.
Those four steps are how we suggest people get going and
really go down a path of what's
the right Azure landing zone for them.
>> Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today, Brian.
You've really cleared up what landing zones are
and we then can go in and find out some more information.
Then what we're going to do is we're going to drop some links in
the description box if you want to check out some
of these resources that Brian has mentioned.
Please stay tuned in to the Azure Enablement Show,
where we're going to be digging deeper into landing zones and
showing you how you can actually
deploy them within your environment.
[MUSIC]