Azure Landing Zone
An Azure Landing Zone is a pre-structured, security- and compliance-aligned Azure tenant baseline that serves as the foundation for cloud migrations. It defines subscription topology, network hub, identity integration, policy guardrails, logging and cost controls — typically delivered as Infrastructure-as-Code (Bicep / Terraform).
Azure Landing Zone in practice
Microsoft defines the Azure Landing Zone in the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) as a curated reference architecture. Components: management group hierarchy, hub-spoke network, Azure Policy for compliance guardrails (e.g. mandatory tagging, mandatory encryption), centralised logging via Azure Monitor / Log Analytics, cost controls via budgets and tagging standards. Benefits: workloads can be deployed into a compliance-aligned environment from day one, instead of improvising the architecture first. It avoids the typical anti-patterns: subscription sprawl, missing identity concept, uncontrolled costs, absent audit trails.