Cloud Computing, Central to IT Modernization
Consumers increasingly expect digital offerings from companies they do business with. From online and mobile banking to QSR kiosks and even facial recognition and VR apps, both B2B and B2C customers are placing increasing pressure on organizations to digitize and modernize their offerings. Cloud infrastructure has become a clear enabler for businesses to extend new digital offerings to customers, enabling them to rapidly innovate while decreasing their time to market. Yet, knowing where and how to begin can be a challenge, especially for large enterprises who face these pressures across product lines and must be able to answer ongoing questions of security, compliance and risk management in the cloud adoption process. Whether you are new to public cloud, or you are looking to take your existing cloud environment to the next level, it’s imperative to start with a sound cloud foundation that employs security by design best practices and principles.
Pressure to Get It Right is High
The quality of the cloud environment created directly impacts the future function of services and applications moved to the cloud. It also directly affects everything from future customer loyalty to assuring data security. Clearly, starting on the right path represents an ever more critical stage in any cloud journey. A hybrid or multi-cloud approach is quickly becoming a fundamental reality of executing digital business transformation at scale. Building the right cloud foundation — one that offers security, scalability and can be extended over time — is a critical first step regardless of your cloud strategy, and one that we will explore in-depth in this paper.
Using a Cloud Landing Zone
In the military, a landing zone is a safe place where aircraft can land. Similarly, in the public cloud, a landing zone is a safe place for services to land as they move through delivery pipelines. Landing zones are part of a proven framework for delivering services with greater quality and speed. The landing zone is where services deploy and as a result is focused on catching service agnostic components as they are delivered via processes designed specifically to automate the delivery of services into the landing zone. The concept of a service-agnostic landing zone is very critical as a service agnostic landing zone is very efficient and facilitates easy, automated repeatability. As an enterprise transitions from a traditional Development – IT Operations framework, a cloud landing zone is important as it provides needed efficiency, standardization, and governance.