Cloud Foundations 101: Simplifying Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Establish a consistent architecture for deploying cloud environments in your organization with a cloud foundation.

June 18, 2024 | By John Raven

Cloud adoption is essential for a modern enterprise, but it takes more than flipping a switch to establish secure cloud environments. To simplify adopting the cloud in your organization, you need a way to establish consistent infrastructure and operation standards for each cloud environment—without starting from scratch every time.

Implementing a cloud foundation is a crucial part of any cloud adoption strategy. Cloud foundations can ensure that every cloud environment you deploy meets the same standards for security, operations and governance. With this reliable infrastructure as a foundation, your enterprise can add other features to ensure that you can operate workloads in the cloud safely and securely.

What Is a Cloud Foundation?

In the context of enterprise cloud adoption, the process can be compared to building a house. When constructing a house, you need a foundation first, and then you build everything on top of that base. Similarly, cloud foundations provide a starting point for additional cloud environments and architecture in an enterprise. Without that solid foundation, there will be issues in the future with your cloud environment, such as struggling with scaling or keeping your data secure.

But with a strong cloud foundation, you can spin up cloud environments consistently and repeatedly with best practices in place for operations and security. That initial cloud installation can serve as the template for all future deployments and act as a foundation for other data modernization projects across your enterprise.

Benefits of Cloud Foundations

Businesses establish and implement processes so they don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” every time they want to repeat a task. A cloud foundation gives your enterprise a consistent architecture design, allowing you to develop, deploy and operate workloads in a cloud environment while ensuring security and meeting regulatory requirements. But that’s just the beginning of the advantages that cloud foundations offer. They also:

• Provide consistent security and compliance across enterprise cloud environments
• Can be automated so that new features—or even a complete cloud environment—can be deployed consistently
• Streamline the process of deploying cloud architecture for specific use cases
• Are more efficient and cost-effective for enterprises
• Simplify what would otherwise be a complex process
• Limit friction and mistakes in deploying cloud environments

The Key Components of a Cloud Foundation

Each cloud foundation is different, depending on enterprise needs and standards, but most have similar features to simplify enterprise cloud adoption:

• Network enables secure connectivity to services, users and on-premises infrastructure.
• Identity and access management (IAM) is a key component of security, as it controls who can access resources and what types of actions are permitted on these resources.
• Operational resilience and disaster recovery ensure business continuity and data availability during disruptions.
• Monitoring, logging and observability maintain visibility and ensure compliance.

But the primary—and perhaps most important—feature of a cloud foundation is known as a landing zone. Landing zones enable your enterprise to deploy an architecture and layer additional features on top of a cloud foundation.

What Are Landing Zones?

A landing zone is a modular, scalable configuration that enables an enterprise to adopt a cloud for a specific use case by adding features as needed. As more features are developed, they can be added into the landing zone accelerator to integrate those features more easily into the cloud environment. Landing zones are designed for large enterprises that require multiple cloud environments and want to deploy them in a controlled, deliberate fashion.

Simplify Your Enterprise Cloud Adoption

A solid cloud foundation is a critical aspect of a successful cloud adoption strategy. It can help your organization easily deploy cloud environments that meet regulatory and security standards. With the right cloud foundation and the right technology partner, your enterprise can more easily and consistently spin up and operate new cloud environments. Our enterprise cloud services experts combine best practices with extensive experience from numerous enterprise implementations to ensure that your cloud foundation meets the needs of your organization, whether you choose Microsoft Azure or another cloud service provider.