Cloud Landing Zone

The cloud foundation your teams should have built on from the start.

When teams provision cloud environments without a standard foundation, they create inconsistency. Some accounts have logging enabled. Others do not. Some have network segmentation. Others have flat networks accessible to everything. Security policies are applied inconsistently, cost controls are absent and compliance baselines are implied rather than enforced. A landing zone fixes this - not by slowing teams down, but by making the secure, governed path the default path. Node designs and deploys landing zones as a managed service, on AWS, Azure or GCP, built entirely with Infrastructure as Code.

What a landing zone is and why it matters

A cloud landing zone is a pre-configured, standardised environment that provides the baseline infrastructure, security controls and governance guardrails that all workloads deployed into your cloud should inherit. It is not an application. It is the foundation that applications are deployed onto.

Without a landing zone, cloud environments grow organically. Each team or project creates what it needs when it needs it. Over time, the result is an estate with inconsistent security controls, no clear account structure, overlapping network ranges, no centralised logging, and cost and compliance postures that nobody fully understands. Audits become painful exercises in discovery rather than confirmation of known controls.

With a landing zone, every workload starts from a baseline that includes the controls your security team requires, the cost governance your finance team needs, and the network architecture your operations team can manage. Teams move faster because the foundation decisions have already been made correctly.

Identity and access management model

Identity is the most important control in a cloud environment. Our landing zone designs establish an identity model from the outset.

Single identity source - we connect your cloud environment to your existing identity provider - Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace or a custom solution via SAML or OIDC - so that cloud access is controlled through the same identity system as the rest of your organisation. No separate cloud-only user directories.

Role-based access with least privilege - we define IAM roles aligned to job functions rather than individual users, with permissions scoped to the minimum required for each role. Developers get what they need to build. Operations get what they need to run. Neither gets more than they need.

Privileged access management - administrative access to cloud resources is time-limited and requires explicit elevation rather than being permanently assigned. We implement just-in-time privileged access patterns that reduce the blast radius of compromised credentials.

Service identity and workload federation - applications and automated processes authenticate using service identities, not long-lived API keys. We implement workload identity federation that allows cloud-native services and CI/CD pipelines to authenticate securely without managing static credentials.

Network architecture

Cloud network architecture decisions made early are difficult to change later. We get them right from the start.

Account and VPC structure - we design an account structure that separates environments (production, staging, development, sandbox), separates workload types (shared services, application workloads, data) and provides clear blast radius boundaries. Network segmentation is enforced at the account boundary, not just by security groups.

Hub-and-spoke connectivity - a centralised networking hub handles connectivity to on-premise environments, between accounts, and to the internet. Spoke networks connect to the hub for centralised egress, DNS and security inspection rather than managing their own connectivity independently.

Private connectivity - all internal service communication flows over private network paths. Public endpoints are minimised. Where external access is required, it flows through controlled ingress points with WAF, DDoS protection and logging.

DNS architecture - centralised DNS management with split-horizon resolution, private hosted zones for internal services and consistent naming conventions that work across accounts and cloud providers.

Guardrails and policy as code

Guardrails are controls that prevent configuration drift from the baseline. They are not optional security reviews - they are automated enforcement.

Preventive guardrails - Service Control Policies (AWS), Azure Policy or GCP Organisation Policies that prevent non-compliant actions from being taken at all. Teams cannot disable logging, open unrestricted internet access or deploy unencrypted storage, because the policy prevents it.

Detective guardrails - continuous configuration assessment that identifies resources that drift from the baseline and alerts or automatically remediates. Non-compliant resources are flagged immediately rather than discovered in quarterly audits.

Policy as code with OPA - complex governance rules are expressed as Open Policy Agent policies, versioned in Git, tested in CI pipelines and deployed consistently across accounts. Policy changes go through the same review process as application changes.

Compliance baseline

A landing zone is not a compliance certification, but it establishes the technical controls that most compliance frameworks require.

Logging and audit trail - centralised collection of all cloud API calls, resource configuration changes, network flow logs and authentication events into a tamper-protected logging account. Retention periods are configurable to match your regulatory requirements.

Encryption - all data at rest is encrypted by default using customer-managed keys where required. Key management is centralised with rotation policies and audit logging of all key usage.

Compliance frameworks - our landing zone designs align to the technical controls required by ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, Cyber Essentials Plus, PCI DSS and GDPR. The landing zone does not achieve certification on its own, but it establishes the foundation that makes certification achievable.

Cost governance setup

Cost governance built into the foundation is dramatically more effective than cost controls added later.

Account-level budgets and alerts - every account has a defined budget with automated alerts at configurable thresholds. Finance teams see cloud spend by account, by team and by workload category without needing to interpret raw billing data.

Tagging enforcement - resource tagging policies ensure every resource is tagged with owner, environment, project and cost centre. Untagged resources are automatically flagged and prevented in production environments.

Cost anomaly detection - automated detection of unusual spending patterns with immediate alerting. A misconfigured autoscaling group or an orphaned high-cost resource is identified within hours, not at the end of the billing cycle.

Infrastructure as Code - built to last

Everything we deploy in a landing zone is written as Infrastructure as Code using Terraform. Nothing is manually configured in the console.

Version-controlled infrastructure - all landing zone components live in Git with full change history. Every modification is a pull request, reviewed and approved before deployment. The state of your infrastructure is always knowable and auditable.

Reusable modules - we build landing zone components as reusable Terraform modules. Adding a new environment, a new region or a new workload account is a configuration change, not a manual rebuild.

Pipeline-driven deployment - infrastructure changes are deployed through CI/CD pipelines with automated validation, plan review and apply stages. Drift detection runs continuously and alerts when reality diverges from the code.