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Get Cloud Right the First Time with Secure Landing Zones

Written by Trace3 | March 4, 2024

Few companies can claim their path to the cloud was an easy one. For some, getting started was the biggest hurdle. For others, their migration experience can best be described as ‘tricky,’ as many organizations lack the in-house skills to build the secure landing zones needed to migrate sensitive workloads.

As many as three-quarters claim a lack of resources and expertise as one of the top three cloud challenges they experience, as captured in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report.1 This resource constraint often leads to:

  • Operational errors and future rework

  • An increased risk of reversal or repatriation

  • Issues of noncompliance

  • Cloud cost overruns

Flexibility Can Translate to Risk and Waste

Choosing the most suitable targets from public cloud, edge locations, or the data center for each application is crucial. This decision can be the deciding factor between a transformation success and failure. Opting for mass cloud migrations and choosing a different target for each workload offers tremendous flexibility. However, this path can result in ineffective workload operations or costs coming in higher than expected.

Organizations can also find that this “choose anything for everything” path comes with an exponentially expanding surface area for a potential:

  • Increase in operational complexity and cost: Resources can be underutilized or over-provisioned, wasting as much as a quarter of cloud spend.2

  • Loss of end-to-end visibility: Fragmented tools make the environment harder to secure and manage.

  • Impact on health and performance of services: A lack of standardized configurations can lead to inconsistent and suboptimal performance across these varied environments.

  • Exposure to cyberattacks, misuse, and abuse: Limited, stretched staff can lead to additional gaps in security posture.

The answer? Secure cloud landing zones.

Cloud landing zones are modular, well-architected, and pre-configured environments designed to adhere to design principles for secure and compliant cloud operations. They help bring consistency to policies, management, and operations.

Three Weeks to Secure Cloud Landing Zones

Trace3 and F5 can help you build secure cloud landing zones, aligning your cloud operations with your business and technical requirements. Ensure a successful migration with F5 Distributed Cloud Services and Trace3, connecting and securing your applications and APIs in any environment and protecting your workloads upon migration.

The Trace3 secure cloud landing zone engagement prepares you for secure apps and APIs in AWS or Azure environments. The three-week engagement includes:

WEEK 1
WEEK 2
WEEK 3

· Critical Design Area Session workshop

· Network design with IP validation

· Access and virtual appliance configuration

· F5 Distributed Cloud Console access and validation

· Deployment and validation of F5 and Enterprise Scale Landing Zone templates

· F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge deployed to cloud landing zone

· Remote access validation against template

· F5 app and API use case review

· Security runbook implementation

· Client training

· Customization of follow-on landing zones

A well-engineered cloud landing zone can help:

  • Secure, connect, and scale your apps across clouds without over-provisioning resources.

  • Lower your risk of a costly data breach or outage with visibility, security, and troubleshooting.

  • Keep your apps operating at peak performance by scaling on demand.

Securing Your Landing Zones with F5

Trace3 and F5 share a vision where traditional network deployment models can be transformed into a flexible platform that delivers optimized performance, visibility, and security for all applications and APIs across a distributed IT landscape.

The Trace3 cloud solutions team brings validated best practices and templates for designing and deploying secure landing zones for AWS and Azure. Protect and connect your applications and APIs with full integration of F5 Distributed Cloud Services to:

  • Reduce risk

  • Accelerate time to value

  • Improve cost efficiency

  • Increase compliance

  • Streamline Day 2 operations

  • Limit future moves or repatriation

To learn more and get cloud right with a well-engineered cloud landing zone, speak to a Trace3 expert today.

Sources:

  1. Flexera, 2023 State of the Cloud Report, January 2023
  2. ibid.