AWS Landing Zone Deployment For A University

Scalability and Governance: The customer faced challenges in managing a growing number of workloads and users across multiple AWS accounts. As their infrastructure is expanding, with the DR environment being a new addition, maintaining consistent security policies and governance became increasingly complex and time-consuming.

Security and Compliance: The customer’s existing architecture lacked the necessary security controls and compliance measures required for their industry standards and regulations. Data protection, access controls, and auditing were critical concerns that needed to be addressed.

Cost Management: The absence of a centralized cost management strategy led to difficulty in monitoring and optimizing cloud expenses. This resulted in unexpected costs and inefficiencies, making budgeting and forecasting a challenge.

Ongoing Support: The customer required an extended team to support and maintain the AWS environment on an ongoing basis to address the current challenges with limited IT resources and cloud skillsets.

Implementing a Landing Zone: The decision to implement a landing zone with AWS Control Tower provided the foundation for creating a multi-account AWS environment with centralized management and governance. A landing zone acts as a pre-configured, secure, and scalable AWS environment, which can serve as a template for future account setups.

Account Structure and Isolation: A well-structured account hierarchy with clearly defined boundaries was established to segregate different workloads, development stages, and teams. This allowed for more granular control and improved isolation between different applications.

Security and Compliance: Security tools and services were utilized to enforce best practices, such as AWS Config, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, Amazon GuardDuty, and Secrurity Hub ensuring continuous monitoring and adherence to compliance requirements.

Centralized Cost Management: By setting up a landing zone, the customer gained access to consolidated billing and AWS Cost Explorer, enabling better cost visibility and budget allocation across the AWS Organization. The resource tagging and budget alerts were also implemented to proactively manage spending.

Disaster Recovery and Redundancy: As part of the landing zone implementation, the CK worked closely with the customer to integrate disaster recovery (DR) strategies and built redundancy into the architecture. AWS services like Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication and Multi-AZ deployments were adopted for critical applications. This ensured business continuity and minimized downtime in case of infrastructure failures. The existing Disaster Recovery (DR) setup from the current AWS account was seamlessly onboarded to the Landing Zone without compromising the integrity of the DR capabilities.

Automated Backup and Restore: Leveraging AWS services like AWS Backup, the customer automated the backup process for their data and configurations. This not only reduced the risk of data loss but also simplified the restoration process during any unforeseen incidents.

Ongoing Managed Services: The proposed solution included the onboarding of customer’s entire AWS environment to CK’s managed services for ongoing support and maintenance. This helped customer maintain the current in-house resource count and leverage CK’s expertise in terms of scale. CK’s managed services covers regular monitoring, proactive management, troubleshooting and timely resolution of issues in the AWS environment. Managed services also encompass security monitoring, backups, and updates to keep the environment secure and up to date.

The implementation of a Control Tower based landing zone not only addressed the customer’s challenges related to scalability, security, and cost management but also added a strong resilience component to their cloud infrastructure. By proactively planning for potential disruptions and incorporating robust recovery measures, the customer is better prepared to withstand unexpected events and ensure the uninterrupted delivery of their services.

Enhanced Security and Compliance: The implementation of a landing zone significantly improved the customer’s security posture. Security controls were consistently applied across all accounts, ensuring data protection and regulatory compliance.

Streamlined Account Management: With a structured multi-account setup, the customer achieved greater agility in managing their infrastructure. Different teams could independently manage their respective workloads while adhering to the company’s overarching governance policies.

Improved Scalability and Flexibility: The landing zone architecture allowed the customer to scale rapidly, accommodating increased workloads and new projects seamlessly. It also facilitated faster deployment of new environments, reducing time-to-market for applications.

Optimized Cost Control: Through centralized cost management and monitoring, the customer gained better visibility into their cloud spending. This led to cost optimizations, eliminating unnecessary resources and ensuring budget predictability.

Resilience and Business Continuity: By incorporating disaster recovery strategies and automated backups, the infrastructure’s resilience against potential failures or disasters were improved. This bolstered their ability to recover quickly and maintain business continuity, even in the face of unforeseen challenges.

Strong support team: The comprehensive managed services from CK allowed customer feel confident about the ability to scale their current workloads and adopt newer cloud services and offerings.