As a technical decision-maker, you’re usually tasked with ensuring your organisation’s cloud infrastructure is secure, compliant, and cost-effective. Deploying a Landing Zone in your environment gives you a solid foundation for your enterprise’s cloud journey. This blog post will explore the key things you should consider while building a Landing Zone on AWS, such as alignment with the Well-Architected Framework, security, compliance, governance, and data sovereignty, while also considering cost efficiency for your SaaS workloads.
AWS Well-Architected Framework: Your Blueprint for Success
At the core of building a robust Landing Zone is the AWS Well-Architected Framework. But what is this? It’s a set of guiding principles that help you design and build secure, efficient, and scalable systems on AWS. The framework covers six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. We’re not going to go into more details about the pillars or the Framework, but you can read more about it here.
By aligning your Landing Zone with these principles, you ensure a strong foundation for your cloud infrastructure so it adheres to best practices and meets your organisation’s business requirements.
Landing Zone
This brings us to the next term used earlier: what is an AWS Landing Zone? It’s a well-architected, secure, multi-account AWS environment that allows organisations to set up and govern their cloud infrastructure. It provides a scalable and secure foundation, incorporating AWS and industry best practices to run production ready workloads using central governance.
At this point you might be asking yourself a question: why a single account might not be enough? To mention a few reasons:
- Security controls: Different applications/environments might require different control policies and mechanisms. For example, it might be easier to talk to an auditor and point to a single account that hosts your Payment Card Industry (PCI) workload.
- (Data) Isolation: An account is a unit of security protection and can help with compliance, e.g. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- Many teams & business processes with different responsibilities and resource needs.
- Billing: Splitting by account is the most straightforward way of separating your cloud bill (but you should still use tags as well).
- Limit allocation: Limits are per account. Yes, this means you can make an extra account to get more capacity.
We also have another post about the topic, diving into more detail why you should use more than a single account.
Comprehensive Security and Compliance
As mentioned earlier, security and compliance are critical concerns for SaaS providers, as they handle sensitive customer data and must adhere to various industry regulations. A Landing Zone provides a robust security baseline that aligns with industry best practices and regulatory requirements, ensuring the protection of your SaaS application and customer data.
The key security and compliance features of a Landing Zone include:
- Identity and Access Management (IAM): Implement role-based access controls and enforce least-privilege principles to restrict access to your SaaS application and AWS resources.
- Network Isolation: Configure secure network architectures with Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), network Access Control Lists (ACLs), and security groups to protect your applications and customer data.
- Data Protection: Leverage AWS services for data encryption at rest and in transit, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of your application data.
- Logging and Monitoring: Centralised logging and monitoring across your AWS accounts for security analysis, incident response, and compliance auditing of your SaaS applications.
- Regulatory Compliance: Align your SaaS cloud infrastructure with industry-specific regulations and standards, such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and SOC 2, ensuring compliance and building trust with your customers.
While considering your security strategy, make sure you understand the AWS shared responsibility model, and what security concerns are within your remit:
Governance and Data Sovereignty
If you as a SaaS provider operate globally, data sovereignty and governance become critical considerations. So using a Landing Zone gives you a comprehensive governance framework which enables you to establish and enforce policies, standards, and guardrails across your AWS accounts and resources, ensuring the secure and compliant delivery of your SaaS application.
Implementation and Customization
While a Landing Zone provides a comprehensive framework, its successful implementation using something like AWS Control Tower often requires additional customisation to align with your organisation’s specific requirements and constraints. When implementing a Landing Zone you can use different tooling to deploy and manage it. To name the most popular examples:
- AWS Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA)
- Customisations for Control Tower (CfCT)
- Account Factory for Terraform (AFT)
- Or a custom build (not using AWS Control Tower), by using something like Terraform modules or custom providers.
If you team are using Terraform to automate cloud configuration and you’re thinking now: Would something like AWS Control Tower be a suitable solution for us? Well, the short answer is absolutely, but you can read more about the topic in this blog post.
Here are some key considerations:
- SaaS Architecture and Deployment: Evaluate your SaaS application architecture and deployment strategies to determine the appropriate account and resource organisation within AWS Landing Zone.
- Security and Compliance Requirements: Identify and address your SaaS application’s unique security and compliance requirements, including industry-specific regulations and customer-driven policies.
- Integration and Migration Strategy: Develop a strategy for integrating and migrating your existing SaaS application or infrastructure to the new AWS Landing Zone environment.
- Automation and DevOps: Leverage AWS services and tools for infrastructure as code (IaC - Terraform, Pulumi, CDK, CloudFormation, etc.), continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and automation to streamline the deployment and management of your SaaS application and its AWS Landing Zone environment.
- Monitoring and Optimisation: Implement robust monitoring and optimization processes to ensure the ongoing security, performance, and cost-effectiveness of your SaaS application and its AWS Landing Zone environment.
Also keep in mind building a Landing Zone is not a one-time effort. As your organisation grows and technology evolves, your Landing Zone should adapt. Implement a continuous improvement process that includes: regular reviews of your architecture against the Well-Architected Framework, periodic security assessments and penetration testing, ongoing cost optimization efforts, staying informed about new AWS services and features that could enhance your Landing Zone.
Engaging with AWS partners
Successful implementation often requires specialised expertise and experience. Consider working with an AWS partner, such as The Scale Factory, who have deep knowledge and practical experience in deploying and optimising AWS Landing Zones for SaaS organisations.
We can provide valuable guidance, best practices, and bring the experience gained by delivering 100+ Landing Zone implementations, including customised solutions tailored to SaaS requirements.
Conclusion
Building a robust Landing Zone on AWS is a critical step in ensuring your organisation’s cloud infrastructure is secure, compliant, and cost-effective. With a well designed Landing Zone, you’ll be better positioned to leverage the full potential of AWS, drive innovation, and achieve your business objectives in the cloud.
As a technical decision-maker, your role in championing and overseeing the development of a comprehensive Landing Zone is crucial. By investing in this foundation, you’re setting your organisation up for long-term success by focusing on solving business problems.
Like the sound of all that but want some expert help implementing Control Tower in your AWS estate? Our SaaS Foundations package includes a bespoke Control Tower design and installation by our experienced AWS consultants for a simple fixed price.
This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.
