Building some of the largest cloud landing zones in SA

Building some of the largest cloud landing zones in South Africa is a strategic initiative that enables organisations to establish a robust, scalable and secure cloud environment tailored to their specific business needs. A landing zone serves as the foundational infrastructure that supports cloud adoption, providing a standardised yet customisable framework that aligns with industry best practices and compliance requirements.

The process involves designing and deploying a well-architected cloud environment, which includes setting up networking, identity and access management, security controls, logging, monitoring and governance structures.

By creating a landing zone, enterprises can ensure consistent environments across multiple accounts or subscriptions, automate essential operations and maintain a high level of security and compliance.

The cloudandthings.io team is made up of individuals that have been involved in some of largest landing zone builds in South Africa. We know what it takes to build cloud platforms from single accounts to environments that host hundreds of applications in production.

Building some of the largest cloud landing zones in South Africa.

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One of our financial services clients was operating within a traditional on-premises environment, constrained by legacy systems that limited their ability to innovate and scale. As they looked to transition to the cloud, their primary goals were to empower their teams to develop and deploy new solutions while also enabling the seamless consumption of their services by customers. However, they faced challenges, including uncertainty about where to begin and the imperative to maintain stringent security and governance due to their status as a regulated entity.

Recognising these challenges, we developed a bespoke enterprise landing zone tailored specifically to their needs. Our solution was designed to integrate with and enhance their existing operational processes. We implemented segregated environments to ensure robust management of operations and security, providing the client with a clear and organised framework for cloud adoption.

To ensure efficiency and consistency, the entire solution was built using infrastructure as code (IAC) coupled with CI/CD automation. This approach not only allowed the Cloud Platform Team to manage and support the environment with ease, but also provided the agility and scalability required for future growth. The networking, security and operational components were carefully architected to meet the stringent requirements of the client, ensuring compliance while enabling innovation.

Additionally, we incorporated platform engineering principles to further optimise the client’s cloud environment. By building re-usable components, standardising configurations and creating self-service capabilities, we empowered the client’s product teams to focus on delivering value rather than managing infrastructure.

This approach fostered a culture of innovation and efficiency, enabling the client to leverage the full potential of their cloud investment while the cloud platform team maintained control over security and governance.

Ensuring that the client's cloud environment is set up in a controlled and governed way that is secure by default allowed them to focus on what mattered most to them, building and deploying apps that increase business value.