>> Hey, everybody, stay tuned to
where Rob and Brian are going to be taking me
through how to pick the right landing zone for my organization.
[MUSIC]
>> Welcome to the Azure enablement show,
where we're talking to make yourself the
expert about some of the questions and
obstacles that you might face on your Cloud adoption journey.
Now, in a previous episode,
we touched on landing zones which are great ways to
enable you to deploy your Cloud environments faster.
But to dive in deeper and to allow us to
talk about how you can actually pick the right landing zone,
I'm welcoming back Brian to the show. Welcome Brian.
>> Hey, Sarah. How are you doing?
>> Awesome. We're also joined
by Rob who's a first timer on the show,
so welcome to the show Rob.
>> Happy to be here. Thank you Sarah.
>> Awesome. Now, in the last episode,
we touched on landing zones and we
mentioned that there's different types.
Brian, could you take me through what
those types of landing zones are again, please?
>> Yeah, we talked in the last episode about how there are
some landing zones that are great
for starting small and expanding over time.
Some that really focused on starting with an app like [inaudible]
so that you can start with
the controls that you need when you begin adoption.
I think we'll go a bit more in the both of those in stay session.
>> Awesome. I'm starting
to think about how we could use these landing zones,
and I'm remembering when I was a consultant,
and old different organizations in IT departments that I spoke to,
and they all have different operating models,
some had full control of their IT,
others who only had digital control where they were
governed by a more global IT department.
How does landing zones adapt to
those different operating models that we can
see across them or organizations?
>> That's a great question and
we'll talk about that in a little bit
later in the session when we do a comparison side-by-side.
Rob, you may answer that one, sir?
>> Yeah. So I think what's really important is to quickly just
talk about the implementation options that we have,
and then you can go from
those implementation options to how
you are actually organized in
your environment to really help you out.
If you take a look, I've got a couple of slides,
just to help us out to talk about this.
Of course, for Microsoft itself,
we have a couple different implementation options;
we have the start small and expand,
we use our Azure Blueprints with ARM templates,
to go ahead and deploy your landing zone.
On the slide you see here on the left-hand side,
I actually have an example here for you today
of our CAF Migrate landing zone,
where you would actually go ahead and deploy resource groups,
it would start you off with some basic things like,
storage, Log Analytics, with a Key Vault in there for you.
Then of course, your workload itself would actually show up in
the resource group itself in that Azure virtual network.
Then the other implementation option
we have is the one we call enterprise scale.
With enterprise scale, it's also deployed
using Azure Policy in ARM templates,
but it's a little different, we don't use blueprints in that one.
As you can just see from the diagrams,
there's a big difference in what
you get from the left to the right,
depending on which approach you go with.
The thing to show you though in the enterprise scale side is that,
if I drill in a little bit here,
in this architectural diagram,
the landing zone itself exists right here,
and this is where your workloads themselves would go.
All the other pieces of enterprise scale built you the foundation,
so you can actually stamp out
multiple landing zones for
all your critical line of business applications.
I wouldn't do justice if I didn't just quickly touch
on our other implementation options using third parties,
like we have implementation options that come from our partners.
Our partners have been working with landing zones for a long time,
and they have a bunch of different ones
available through their services,
and we have Terraform modules,
so what you will find that if you go into
the Terraform modules page and
search for clouded option framework,
you will actually find modules,
not only to help you with the start small approach,
but also with the enterprise scale approach.
By understanding those options up front
and then mapping that to your operating model itself,
like you asked in your question,
this is how you can really
figure out which is the best approach for you.
Brian, do you want to take us to the operating models?
>> Yeah, I'd be really happy to.
We will look at the operating models through the lens of
four common models that we see across their customer base.
A lot of customers have decentralized operations,
where they're not trying to create
shared services or bringing things together,
they're managing one workload at a time.
But probably more larger share of
our customer base focus on central operations.
In this small environment we do have
this centralized teams for ITOps or IT security here,
or whatever those roles may be,
they own production and they manage the workloads.
Then there's also the Enterprise Operations,
which is where we're trying to drive customers to over time.
Well, you can think about
centralized operations and decentralized operations,
and more of a democratized state.
Where some environments are stable state they're steady,
you don't have to do a whole lot,
you can manage them centrally.
But others you need
that rich innovation capability
that you would get with a decentralized model.
Then some customers that are really trying to
figure out how do I bring all of these together,
and they've got distributed operations where
some datacenters are centralized, others decentralized,
and we're trying to help them find the right balance so
they can manage distributed ops crossed all our datacenters.
Each of these has a different degree of environmental complexity,
and depending on which one of those best fit your needs,
you may find that different implementation options
that's a better fit for you.
>> Excellent. That certainly clears up the question
about how you pick the landing zone and what you think about it if
you've got different operating models though.
I'm also slightly worried that if I was
in charge of picking a landing zone,
I may pick the wrong one.
Is it possible to actually pick the wrong one?
>> Yeah, definitely is.
If you choose an operating model,
or if you choose a landing zone that
fits a central operating model,
but then you need to go with enterprise,
it can be a little bit difficult to make that transition.
If you start with an enterprise operating model and
really you don't need those centralized shared services,
you may end up with a lot of extra overhead
to manage that you didn't really need.
It's really important to pick the right one.
Rob, would you say the same, sir?
>> Brian, one of the things that I
always bring up with my customers around,
can you choose the wrong one or what is the impact to that?
Because that can happen.
You can take the wrong approach that doesn't work out.
I tell them I hate to see when
a customer spends three or four months going down,
say one approach to building
their foundations for their landing zones
and then realizing that the other approach would
have been better for their particular organization.
Maybe they didn't identify their operating model correctly,
maybe they thought they were in centralized operations,
but really they wanted to get to
enterprise operations and they
should have just started on the other path,
it would have put them there faster.
>> The operating module is one of
the decision makers for the landing zone,
if I'm completing you guys correct.
Are there other decisions that could
potentially impact your landing zones,
and what level of Azure scaling your staff has,
project leak teams, budgetary requirements,
do they all feed into how you pick the landing zone as well?
>> Yeah, there's a lot of considerations there,
Sarah, for when you select your landing zone.
In fact, we have a slide that we commonly use to help
guide our customers or even partners when they're
trying to decide what's the best option for them.
There's a bunch of considerations
to think about when you go through this.
Remember, we're not saying that one is better than the other,
you just have to understand what's
the right choice for your organization depending on,
like you said, your operating
model and some other considerations as well.
First off, we did talk about the operating model and
how you should understand which one fits you best,
are your centralized operations or enterprise operations.
Sometimes it's not even which one fits you best,
but also where do you want to be in three,
six months, a year,
18 months from now.
That may play into which approach you
take and what makes the most sense.
The other thing to think about is adoption plan considerations.
Are you looking to do something that is going to be long-term,
what kind of velocity are you looking
to drive within your organization,
and are you looking to achieve
operational excellence in the short-term or long-term?
Brian, how would you say that start small really fits into that?
>> Thanks, Rob. If you start
with the start small and expand approach,
there are ways to get to those criteria of self-sufficiency,
adoption velocity, and operational excellence.
But the difference is that if you start small,
it gets you started,
now you have to expand out on that landing zone model.
You would use things like the governance
or the management methodologies inside
the Cloud Adoption Framework to iteratively
build those pieces into the landing zone solution,
whereas enterprise-scale takes a slightly different approach.
Rob, you want to share a little bit about that approach?
>> Yes. What enterprise-scale does, Brian,
is it builds out that foundation for you,
taking into account all the guard rails around security,
identity, network,
even DevOps and automation from out of the gates.
So it builds all that out for you,
which is going to be like we saw in that previous slide,
a much more complex initial architecture that you can have.
But the goal there is to put you on the right path using
the same eight areas of design
that you would use in the start small and expand,
which is leap frogging you through some of
the iterative process to put you
there in a little bit shorter amount of terms.
It doesn't mean you're always ready to do
that though from your organization,
so again, you need to choose which one is best for you.
>> Yeah. Ultimately, I think that
second sentence there summarizes it well.
Are you trying to build your own solution over time,
or do you want to start with
Cloud-native operations that are ready to go right away?
>> Right. Sarah, does that make sense to you so far?
>> Absolutely. Yeah.
>> All right. The other one that comes into
play a lot is around compliance considerations.
When you go to choose your landing zone, a lot of times,
especially, when we get engaged,
whether it's Microsoft,
it's a partner that gets engaged with the customer,
or the customer is just going out to
the Cloud Adoption Framework
and going through the different methodologies,
they sometimes have time constraints over when they need to have
a particular workload or application that
needs to be compliant in a short amount of time.
Say, for example, I'm a customer that has
BPCI compliant over the next 8-10 weeks.
That comes into play when we think
around which landing zone to choose.
Now, if they're relatively new to Azure and
they haven't built all of the skills that they may need,
they may think about, well,
enterprise-scale can, basically, get them at
a pretty high enough starting point,
where they may be able to get that secure
compliant workload in time,
into their landing zone to meet their timelines.
Again, it may not always work best for them,
especially, when it comes down to around the skill set
of how comfortable are they in Azure, right, Brian?
>> Yeah. If we look at that
from the other end of the spectrum,
if they start small and expand,
you would want to start with workloads that
didn't have strong compliance requirements.
Maybe things that were low risk,
low data sensitivity requirements,
some of those less important workloads that you can move
through and build those Azure skills over time,
and add the governance and management
methodologies as you understand how the Cloud works.
But not every company has a pool of low-risk,
non-mission critical workloads that they can just experiment with,
so it really depends on what you're trying
to accomplish from compliance perspective.
>> I agree. A lot of times, once you've tried it out,
you've put, like you said,
some pretty low-risk applications in there,
then a workload will come in and there's going to
be regulatory or compliance requirements,
and that's where you really follow
the Cloud Adoption Frameworks to govern and manage
methodologies to really expand that
out and iterate on that initial start small landing zone,
to grow it out to be comprehensive for your workloads.
>> Totally.
>> Awesome. Is that all that is in considerations or is
there any more that I should be
thinking about before I pick a landing zone?
>> Yeah, there's a few others.
Deployment considerations is something that you should really
take to heart when you go through this,
and how you want to go ahead and
deploy and manage your environment,
what makes sense for you.
First off, no matter if you start
small or you use enterprise-scale,
they both come with templates and a portal-based experience.
So if you're not comfortable yet with
the infrastructure as code, that's absolutely okay.
Using start small and expand,
we use Azure Blueprints,
we use Azure Policy in there as well, and ARM templates.
All those things are inside
Blueprint and you could go ahead and follow
up through the portal and deploy that anytime that you need to.
An enterprise-scale, again,
we've got a couple of different deployments,
and in a future session I'll actually take you
through how to deploy enterprise-scale,
so you can see it firsthand.
It just depends for you,
which one makes more sense for where you are.
>> Excellent. I think, I certainly have a clear idea of
how to pick the right landing zone for my organization now.
Thank you so much for your time, Rob and Brian,
and I really do appreciate it.
Some of the resources that can help you pick
the right landing zones are going to be
shared in the description box below,
so make sure you check that out.
Please, stay tuned to the Azure Enablement Show
for future episodes.
[MUSIC]