Azure Landing Zone Rollout Playbook

Azure Landing Zone Rollout Playbook

An Azure landing zone is the governed foundation aligned to the Cloud Adoption Framework: management groups, Azure Policy guardrails, Microsoft Entra ID, and hub-spoke networking, all delivered as code. This program builds the enterprise-scale foundation so application teams land in compliant subscriptions from the start.

Phase-by-Phase

Enterprise Enrollment Design. Define the management-group hierarchy under the tenant root, decide the subscription model (per workload, per environment, or per team), and codify a tagging policy for cost and ownership. Get the hierarchy right early because moving subscriptions later is disruptive.

Policy and Identity. Author Azure Policy initiatives that enforce allowed regions, required tags, and security baselines as preventive and detective controls. Configure Entra ID with conditional access and privileged identity management, and enable Microsoft Defender for Cloud across the estate.

Hub-Spoke Networking. Deploy a hub virtual network with shared services and Azure Firewall, connect application spokes via peering, and centralize egress so traffic is inspected and logged.

Subscription Vending. Automate subscription creation so a team request yields a fully governed subscription. Publish landing-zone blueprints, then onboard a pilot to validate before broad rollout.

Team and Roles

A platform architect owns the CAF-aligned design. DevOps builds Terraform or Bicep modules and the vending pipeline. Security owns Azure Policy and identity. SRE owns monitoring through Azure Monitor and Grafana. Product owns adoption.

Risks and Mitigations

Policy conflicts cause confusing deployment failures; test initiatives in a sandbox management group. Subscription sprawl is controlled by the vending process and tagging. Network bottlenecks at the hub firewall are mitigated by sizing and monitoring egress. Identity misconfiguration is the highest-impact risk; apply least privilege and review PIM assignments.

Success Criteria

Subscription provisioning is fast and self-service, policy compliance is high across the estate, the tenant is audit-ready, and teams operate autonomously inside their landing zones.

Tooling

Terraform or Bicep defines the landing zone, GitHub Actions runs the vending pipeline, Vault or Key Vault manages secrets, Grafana visualizes Azure Monitor data, and Keycloak or Entra ID federates identity.