Importance of Cloud Landing Zone for Financial Companies
For regulated industries with strict compliance requirements, such as insurance, Cloud Landing Zones are invaluable. They build regulatory safeguards into the infrastructure from the start. Automated guardrails enforce data protection, access control, and logging policies, enabling these organisations to navigate complex compliance demands while safely adopting cloud technologies.
Enhanced Security and Compliance
Insurance firms handle large volumes of sensitive data, from personal customer information to financial records. A Cloud Landing Zone strengthens security through features such as data isolation and segmentation, ensuring unauthorised access is minimised. This is critical for maintaining customer trust and compliance with industry standards.
Regulatory compliance, a major concern for insurance companies, becomes more manageable with pre-configured policies embedded in landing zones. Cloud providers often include templates for regulations such as GDPR or other regional frameworks, ensuring firms can meet requirements with minimal manual intervention.
Streamlined Operations for Multi-Account Environments
Insurance companies often need to manage multiple departments, projects, and geographies. Cloud Landing Zones simplify this by providing scalable, multi-account architectures. For example, an insurer can separate accounts for policy management, claims processing, and customer-facing applications, all while maintaining unified governance.
Automation is another key benefit. Landing zones reduce repetitive tasks, such as setting access permissions or configuring security protocols, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives. Additionally, by optimising resource allocation, firms can avoid wasted spending and ensure their cloud investments deliver maximum returns.
Accelerated Time-to-Deployment
In the competitive insurance market, speed is of the essence. Cloud Landing Zones enable faster deployment of workloads by providing pre-configured templates and best practices. This reduces the setup time for new environments, ensuring that digital transformation initiatives are rolled out without unnecessary delays. Moreover, these standardised setups minimise the likelihood of configuration errors, improving overall reliability.
Key Principles for Designing a Landing Zone
To properly design a landing zone, insurance firms should adopt a strategic approach:
- Aligning Organization and Cloud: The Landing Zone must consider the organisational structure and established forms of communication and collaboration. However, not all existing practices can be adapted to the dynamics of working in a cloud environment and fully leverage its potential.
- Building with Cooperation in Mind: Find a balance between control and oversight and the flexibility and autonomy of project teams. The security team or cloud platform team will quickly become overwhelmed by requests from project teams if they are unable to deliver.
- Focusing on the Essentials: The Landing Zone should serve as a foundation for project operations, providing essential support, especially for teams with limited cloud experience. It is not intended to address every challenge or meet every need up front. Instead, it should provide a solid foundation that can be expanded and adapted as specific needs arise.
Building an Effective Cloud Landing Zone Architecture
To get most of the cloud benefits, a Cloud Landing Zone should be well-designed and have all the crucial elements in place. Here is how to design an architecture that meets the high demands of the insurance industry:
Define Account and Network Architecture
- Set up Multiple Accounts: Establish accounts/subscriptions/projects (depending on the CSP’s terminology) for specific functions such as production, development, and testing, ensuring that workloads are isolated but interoperable. Insurance companies can create separate accounts for handling sensitive financial data, compliance testing, and customer-facing applications.
- Secure Network Configuration: Segment network traffic similarly to the organizational structure plan IP address ranges in advance. Identify which systems need to communicate with each other and where they are located: on-premises, other clouds, or service providers. This will determine whether peer-to-peer communication is possible or if a hub-and-spoke model should be implemented and what services do you need.
Implement Governance Policies
- Access and Identity Management: Use Identity and Access Management (IAM) to enforce role-based access, ensuring that only authorised users can access sensitive data and applications.
- Organization Polices: Establish the rules, constraints, and limitations to prevent teams from making common mistakes or taking shortcuts.
- Tagging and Resource Organization: Implement tagging policies to organise resources, track usage, and enforce cost management strategies, making it easier to monitor and control cloud spend. Suggest a naming convention to help avoid naming conflicts.
Build Shared Services and Templates
The next step is to prepare shared services that will be used by multiple projects, such as a mechanism for creating backups, auditing changes, or connecting to the on-premises infrastructure. At this stage, the division of responsibilities between the team overseeing cloud usage and the project teams will be refined. This process should take place in an atmosphere of shared responsibility for the proper use of the platform.
Project teams will create solutions that can serve as templates for other projects, such as a standard delivery of serverless functionality with a messaging service. However, this will require the engagement and encouragement of the cloud platform team (CPT) to ensure that the implementation follows best practice and is designed for reusability.
Sollers Consulting – Your Partner in Cloud Transformation
As mentioned the exact implementation may vary depending on the Cloud Service Provider of choice, so successful navigating through the process requires knowledge and experience with specific Cloud Platform. We can take care of this process for you, as Sollers Consulting is an official partner of leading cloud providers including:
