31 May 2024

Thinking big in Microsoft Azure

Below we discuss the architectural approach needed for application migrations and greenfield development at enterprise-scale in Azure.

The Cloud Adoption Framework has always been at the heart of Microsoft’s narrative when beginning the journey to Azure, providing guidance on a number of aspects of adopting a “Cloud-first” strategy. The framework is designed to provide best practice and guidance based on proven methodologies to ensure that organisations achieve success in the cloud.  

More recently Enterprise-scale has become a key part of defining the successful adoption of Azure Cloud-based services. Enterprise-scale is the "Ready" phase of the Cloud Adoption Framework and is an architectural approach that aligns to the following eight key design areas:  

  • Enterprise enrolment and Azure AD tenants  
  • Identity and access management  
  • Management group and subscription organisation  
  • Network topology and connectivity  
  • Management and monitoring  
  • Business continuity and disaster recovery  
  • Identity and access management  
  • Platform automation and DevOps  

Policy-driven governance provides central IT teams the confidence and comfort that the security guardrails they have put in place are being adhered to across the organisation. The idea here is that any workload or application can be “plugged” into a subscription and it will be secure, backed up, and monitored. 

In turn this also promotes the use of DevOps principles and practices, decentralising the ownership of applications from infrastructure teams to application owners. It gives businesses the power to make technology-based decisions, with the ability to deploy and test new applications at speed with the knowledge that the environment is safe and secure.  

What’s more, DevOps focused teams will be happy to hear that enterprise-scale can be managed end-to-end through IaC. Using terraform or Arm templates, organisations are able to build and manage their enterprise-scale landing zones using standard DevOps practices and methodologies. The same applies whether it be controlling change through standard git practices or using Azure DevOps pipelines to deploy new environments in their entirety.  

Here at Claranet we have the ability to provide customers with scalable, repeatable Enterprise-scale landing zones. Whether it be working with a customer to design a greenfield multi-region enterprise scale deployment to defining it in code, discover cloud solutions suitable for your business needs.