Insights
Landing Zone Guardrails: The 12 Baselines That Prevent Rebuilds
Account structure, logging, network patterns, and SCPs that keep growth safe and predictable.
Why landing zones “fail”
Landing zones usually fail for one of two reasons: (1) they’re overbuilt and nobody can operate them, or (2) they’re underbuilt and you end up rebuilding under pressure. The sweet spot is a minimum viable foundation that is opinionated where it matters and flexible where it doesn’t.
The guardrails to standardize early
- Account strategy: production separated from shared services and security tooling.
- Central logging: CloudTrail/Config/VPC Flow into a security account with retention.
- Identity patterns: roles, permission boundaries, and a clear admin model.
- Network baseline: VPC templates, segmentation, and DNS patterns.
- Encryption defaults: storage, databases, and backups encrypted with managed keys.
A practical build order
- Identity & access model (roles, MFA, break-glass)
- Logging & monitoring baseline (centralized + alerting)
- Network template + shared services
- IaC repo + pipeline + policy checks
- Golden path docs (how to create an account, app, and environment)
What success looks like
- New environments spin up from templates in hours, not weeks.
- Security review is faster because standards are consistent.
- Operations has fewer “special snowflakes” to support.
Next steps
If you want a landing zone you can actually run, we can scope a short engagement to deliver the baseline, templates, and operator docs.