Cloud Landing Zones are essential frameworks for organisations navigating their cloud journey. Advocated by AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, landing zones provide the architectural foundation for optimal cloud adoption, ensuring security, scalability and operational efficiency from day one.
If you want to speak with our cloud experts and see what a Landing Zone actually looks like, book a quick demo.
What is a Cloud Landing Zone?
A Cloud Landing Zone is a well-architected, scalable and secure cloud environment. It provides a foundational architecture with established principles and guidelines for setting up resources, managing identities, enforcing security controls and ensuring compliance. Rather than building ad-hoc infrastructure that requires costly rearchitecting later, a landing zone establishes the right foundation for sustainable growth.
Major cloud providers have developed their own landing zone implementations:
- AWS: Control Tower and Landing Zone Accelerator
- Azure: Azure Landing Zones (part of Cloud Adoption Framework)
- Google Cloud: Cloud Foundation Toolkit
Core Design Pillars
Landing zones establish comprehensive standards across several key pillars:
Security
Protects cloud resources and data through access controls, encryption, policy enforcement (CIS/NIST standards) and vulnerability monitoring. Key elements include:
- Identity and access management with role-based access control
- Network security and segmentation
- Data encryption at rest and in transit
- Compliance framework alignment
- Security monitoring and threat detection
Reliability
Ensures system resilience through automated recovery from infrastructure disruptions, dynamic resource scaling and mitigation of misconfigurations. Includes disaster recovery planning, backup strategies and high-availability architectures.
Performance Efficiency
Optimises cloud resources to deliver required performance without unnecessary costs. Covers:
- Right-sizing compute, storage and network resources
- Performance monitoring and capacity planning
- Resource scaling strategies
- Workload-specific optimisation
Cost Optimisation
Maximises cloud investment value whilst minimising waste. Landing zones integrate FinOps practices through:
- Cost allocation and chargeback models
- Budget alerts and spending controls
- Reserved instance and savings plan management
- Resource tagging standards for cost tracking
- Automated rightsizing recommendations
Operational Excellence
Establishes procedures, best practices and tools for seamless operations:
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for consistent deployments
- CI/CD pipeline integration
- Centralised logging and monitoring
- Incident response procedures
- Documentation and knowledge management
Sustainability
Increasingly critical in 2025, landing zones now incorporate environmental considerations:
- Carbon footprint tracking and reporting
- Energy-efficient resource selection
- Workload optimisation to reduce emissions
- Compliance with environmental regulations
Landing Zones for AI Innovation
As AI and machine learning workloads become central to business strategy, purpose-built AI landing zones have emerged as critical infrastructure. AI workloads present unique challenges that standard landing zones must accommodate:
Why AI Requires Specialised Landing Zones
Compute Intensity: AI model training and inference require substantial GPU resources. Landing zones must provision GPU-optimised virtual machines (such as Azure NDv5, AWS P5 instances, or Google Cloud A3 instances) with proper scaling policies.
Data Requirements: Machine learning operates on massive datasets requiring high-throughput storage (Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage) with low-latency access patterns. Landing zones establish data pipelines, versioning and governance frameworks.
Network Architecture: AI services require secure, high-bandwidth connections between training clusters, data sources and inference endpoints. Landing zones implement hub-and-spoke topologies with private endpoints, ensuring data never traverses the public internet.
Cost Management: AI workloads can generate significant expenses quickly. Landing zones integrate FinOps practices specific to AI, including GPU utilisation tracking, spot instance strategies and cost allocation by model or experiment.
Key Components of AI Landing Zones
- AI Platforms: Azure AI Foundry, AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI deployed in dedicated subscriptions/projects with proper isolation
- Model Registries: Centralised repositories for ML models with versioning, lineage tracking and deployment controls
- Experiment Tracking: Tools like MLflow for monitoring training runs, hyperparameters and model performance
- Data Governance: Access controls ensuring only authorised models can access sensitive training data
- Compliance Framework: Policies addressing AI-specific regulations (such as EU AI Act) and responsible AI principles
Real-World AI Landing Zone Applications
Organisations across industries are leveraging AI landing zones for innovation:
- Healthcare: Secure patient data analysis for diagnostic AI models whilst maintaining HIPAA compliance
- Financial Services: Real-time fraud detection through machine learning models with stringent security controls
- Retail: Personalised recommendation engines processing customer behaviour data at scale
- Manufacturing: Predictive maintenance models analysing IoT sensor data from equipment
AI Governance and Security
AI landing zones implement controls beyond traditional workloads:
- Model access policies restricting which teams can deploy models to production
- Bias detection and fairness monitoring in AI systems
- Explainability requirements for regulated industries
- Data lineage tracking from raw data through trained models
- Responsible AI policies enforcing ethical development practices
Who Needs a Landing Zone?
Landing zones suit organisations with complex requirements:
- Large Enterprises: Complex IT requirements across multiple departments requiring standardisation and consistency
- Regulated Industries: Financial services, healthcare and government organisations requiring stringent compliance from deployment
- Rapidly Scaling Startups: Fast-growing companies needing structured environments that scale whilst maintaining security
- Multi-Cloud Adopters: Organisations using multiple cloud providers requiring consistent operational models
- AI-Driven Organisations: Companies deploying machine learning at scale requiring specialised infrastructure for model development and deployment
Key Landing Zone Components
Account and Resource Organisation
Cloud providers recommend specific organisational structures:
- AWS: Multi-account setup with separate accounts for workloads, security and networking
- Azure: Separate subscriptions for platform components, products and environments enabling data isolation
- GCP: Project and folder hierarchies with organisational policies
Identity and Access Management
Core security component ensuring authenticated and authorised access:
- Integration with identity providers (Active Directory, Okta, Google Workspace)
- Role-based access control (RBAC) with least-privilege principles
- Service accounts and managed identities for applications
- Multi-factor authentication enforcement
Network Architecture
Critical considerations include:
- Global network segmentation strategies
- CIDR allocation and IP address management
- Hub-and-spoke topologies for centralised connectivity
- Private connectivity to on-premises infrastructure
- Network security groups and firewalls
Security and Compliance Baseline
- Encryption standards for data at rest and in transit
- Network security policies and access controls
- Secure software development lifecycle (SDLC) practices
- Regulatory compliance frameworks (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001)
- Automated policy enforcement through cloud-native tools
Logging, Monitoring and Auditing
- Centralised log aggregation and analysis
- Real-time monitoring and alerting
- Audit trail for compliance and security investigations
- Performance metrics and dashboards
- Cost and usage reporting
Implementation Approaches
Pre-Built Solutions
Cloud provider accelerators offer rapid deployment:
- Azure: Azure Landing Zones with Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)
- AWS: Landing Zone Accelerator and Control Tower
- GCP: Cloud Foundation Toolkit
These solutions provide production-ready configurations implementing best practices, significantly reducing initial setup time.
Custom Solutions
Organisations with specific requirements can implement landing zones using Infrastructure as Code:
- Terraform: Cloud-agnostic, extensive module ecosystem
- AWS CloudFormation: Native AWS service with deep integration
- Azure Bicep: Modern Azure-native declarative language
- Pulumi: Code-based approach using familiar programming languages
Custom implementations offer flexibility but require deeper expertise and ongoing maintenance.
FinOps Integration
Modern landing zones integrate FinOps practices from inception. The 2025 FinOps Framework emphasises "Cloud+" approaches—managing not just public cloud, but also SaaS, AI and data centre costs through unified visibility.
Key FinOps capabilities in landing zones:
- Cost allocation: Automated tagging policies enabling accurate chargeback
- Budget controls: Subscription and resource-level spending limits with alerts
- Showback/chargeback: Transparent cost reporting to application teams
- Commitment management: Reserved instances and savings plans optimisation
- Waste elimination: Automated identification of unused resources
Sustainability Considerations
57% of organisations now have or plan to implement cloud sustainability initiatives with carbon footprint tracking. Landing zones increasingly incorporate environmental monitoring:
- Carbon emission tracking by workload and team
- Energy-efficient region selection
- Workload scheduling during low-carbon periods
- Right-sizing to eliminate waste and reduce emissions
- Compliance with environmental regulations and ESG reporting requirements
Getting Started
Our team of experts has built Cloud Landing Zones for businesses across multiple industries, from rapidly scaling startups to global enterprises. We implement security-first architectures that scale with your organisation whilst maintaining compliance and operational efficiency.
Book a demo to see how a Landing Zone can work for your business.
