Landing Zone in Azure

How to Design a Landing Zone in Microsoft Azure

When organizations move to the cloud, it’s tempting to start spinning up resources right away. But without a clear foundation, this can quickly lead to security gaps, governance issues, and cost overruns.

In Microsoft Azure, the best practice is to start with a Landing Zone — a scalable and secure foundation that supports workloads while aligning with governance and compliance requirements.

What is an Azure Landing Zone?

An Azure Landing Zone is a blueprint for cloud adoption. It provides a set of resources, policies, and configurations that establish the foundation for workloads in Azure.

It ensures:

• Security: Policies, RBAC roles, and guardrails are in place.

• Governance: Resource organization, tagging, and cost controls are built-in.

• Scalability: The structure can grow with new projects and teams.

• Compliance: Aligns with standards such as CIS, NIST, and enterprise-specific regulations.

Key Design Principles for an Azure Landing Zone

When designing your Azure Landing Zone, consider the following:

1. Management Groups and Subscriptions

• Organize your Azure environment using Management Groups (for departments, regions, or business units).

• Use multiple subscriptions to separate environments (e.g., PROD, DEV, TEST) or workloads.

2. Identity and Access Management

• Use Azure Active Directory (Entra ID) as the identity backbone.

• Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) aligned to roles (developers, admins, security).

• Enable Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for just-in-time admin access.

3. Networking

• Define a hub-and-spoke network topology:

  • Hub: Shared services like firewalls, VPN, and monitoring.

  • Spokes: Application workloads (isolated by environment or business unit).

• Use Azure Firewall / NSGs to secure network flows.

• Connect on-premises with ExpressRoute or VPN Gateway.

4. Security and Compliance

• Enable Azure Policy to enforce guardrails (e.g., allowed regions, resource types).

• Use Defender for Cloud for continuous security posture management.

• Store secrets and encryption keys in Azure Key Vault.

• Enable logging with Azure Monitor and Sentinel.

5. Monitoring and Management

• Set up Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights.

• Centralize logging to ensure compliance and troubleshooting.

• Define alerts and budgets for proactive governance.

6. Cost Management

• Use tags (e.g., environment, project, owner) to track costs.

• Configure Azure Cost Management + Budgets for visibility and alerts.

7. Automation and Infrastructure as Code

• Deploy landing zones using ARM templates or Terraform.

• Automate policy assignments and monitoring with pipelines.

Example Azure Landing Zone Architecture

A typical setup looks like this:

• Management Group Hierarchy

  • Root

    • Shared Services (identity, monitoring, security)

    • Workloads (DEV, TEST, PROD subscriptions)

• Networking: Hub-and-spoke with firewalls, VPN, and ExpressRoute.

• Identity: Centralized via Azure AD with RBAC policies.

• Security: Azure Policy, Key Vault, Defender for Cloud.

• Monitoring: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Sentinel.

Steps to Build Your Azure Landing Zone

1. Plan – Define your enterprise structure (management groups, subscriptions, RBAC).

2. Design – Choose your networking, security, and governance model.

3. Deploy – Use Microsoft’s Azure Landing Zone accelerators or Terraform.

4. Secure – Apply Azure Policy, Defender, and Key Vault.

5. Monitor – Set up cost management, monitoring, and alerting.

6. Iterate – Adjust as workloads, teams, and compliance needs grow.

Conclusion

An Azure Landing Zone is the bedrock of your cloud strategy. It sets the standards for governance, security, and scalability, ensuring that your cloud adoption journey doesn’t become chaotic.

By starting with a landing zone, you give your teams a secure, compliant, and scalable foundation to innovate faster.