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Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework: Azure landing zone design areas and conceptual architecture.
1. Set the tenant and commercial foundation
Choose which Microsoft Entra tenant and billing enrollment will govern the Azure estate, and document who has authority over those decisions. This is an early architecture choice: Microsoft’s framework treats billing and tenant setup as a design area before the environment’s organization and control choices.
Make ownership explicit
Record who owns tenant-wide decisions, who manages billing relationships, and how platform and workload teams participate. Clarify which organizational boundaries the tenant is intended to represent. Unclear ownership can make later decisions about roles, policy, and subscriptions harder to apply consistently.
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2. Choose a resource hierarchy and subscription model
Design the management group hierarchy and subscription model around the way the organization governs and operates workloads. Management groups provide a place to organize subscriptions and apply inherited governance; subscriptions provide boundaries for workload resources and administration. A hierarchy should be as simple as possible while still supporting policy inheritance, operations, and the organization’s actual structure.
Map boundaries before workloads multiply
Decide how management groups and subscriptions will map to platform functions, workload types, environments, and organizational boundaries. Avoid creating branches merely because they are possible: each branch adds a governance and operational boundary to understand. Misalignment between the hierarchy and operating model can make later moves between subscriptions complicated.
Make subscription vending a platform capability
Define a repeatable subscription-vending process so workload teams can request governed subscriptions without bespoke delays. Specify the required ownership, network and identity integrations, policy assignments, and operational onboarding as part of that process. Microsoft’s landing zone design principles support an approach that enables governed adoption rather than unmanaged side paths.
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3. Define identity boundaries and privileged access
Decide which team owns tenant-wide and platform roles, what application teams may administer, and how access is separated across workloads and environments. These identity boundaries determine who can change the foundation and who can operate an individual workload.
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Use Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) with least privilege. Assign roles at the narrowest practical scope, and use workload-specific groups so access can be reviewed and changed without relying on broad, persistent individual permissions.
Control privileged and deployment paths
For high-privilege tasks, use just-in-time elevation through Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management where appropriate. Review deployment identities and pipelines as part of the same boundary: they should not give workload owners a path to escalate their own privileges. Microsoft’s identity and access guidance sets out implementation considerations for landing zones.
4. Select network topology and connectivity
Choose how Azure networks will connect to on-premises locations, users, and other networks. Hub-and-spoke and Azure Virtual WAN are reference-pattern options, not universal answers. Compare them against the organization’s connectivity requirements, who will operate the network, routing and segmentation needs, resilience expectations, and anticipated scale.
| Decision factor | Hub-and-spoke | Azure Virtual WAN |
|---|---|---|
| Role in the design | A hub-and-spoke reference architecture shown in Microsoft’s landing zone guidance. | A Virtual WAN reference architecture shown in the same guidance. |
| How to choose | Assess it against required connectivity, routing, segmentation, resilience, scale, and network operations ownership. | Assess it against the same requirements; the guidance does not identify one topology as the winner for every enterprise. |
Use the landing zone overview to compare the reference architectures, then select the pattern that fits the organization’s needs and operating responsibilities.
5. Set security and compliance guardrails
Translate business and regulatory obligations into controls that can be enforced or monitored, and define how teams request and receive exceptions. Coordinate policy choices with identity, network, and security design so controls work together rather than creating conflicting requirements.
Separate authorization from policy enforcement
Azure Policy can audit and enforce resource controls, while Azure RBAC governs who can perform actions. Policy complements authorization; it does not replace it. Decide which controls should block noncompliant deployments, which should report deviations, and who reviews those findings.
Give exceptions an owner and a review path
Set out how an exception is justified, approved, tracked, and revisited. Reassess controls when workloads or obligations change. Microsoft’s governance guidance and its design-area framework place governance alongside the other landing zone design considerations.
6. Design the management and resilience baseline
Decide which operational responsibilities are centralized and which stay with workload teams. Establish how the platform will provide inventory, monitoring, alerts, update compliance, backup, recovery, and operational reporting; then make ownership and escalation paths clear.
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Match services and ownership to operations
Microsoft’s management and governance architecture guidance covers monitoring, auditing, backup, disaster recovery, high availability, and compliance, and identifies Azure Monitor, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Update Manager among relevant services. Use its management and governance overview to inform the baseline and decide which teams operate each capability.
Validate recovery at workload level
A landing zone foundation does not establish application-specific recovery objectives by itself. Workload teams must define the recovery needs for their applications and test that the chosen backup and recovery capabilities meet them.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.7. Automate provisioning and choose an implementation path
Set a controlled lifecycle for platform changes and new workload subscriptions: how requests are reviewed, deployed, and maintained. Use repeatable infrastructure-as-code templates and deployment pipelines, and automate subscription vending where the operating model allows. This makes the intended guardrails part of delivery rather than a separate manual step.
Choose an accelerator or a custom build based on fit
Microsoft describes accelerators as the fastest path to a deployment aligned with its recommended practices for most organizations, while still advising teams to choose according to their requirements. Compare an accelerator with a custom build on fit, internal skills, deployment speed, and capacity to maintain the result.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches| Option | When it may fit | Trade-off to assess |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft accelerator | When its approach fits the organization’s requirements and the team wants a fast path aligned with Microsoft’s recommended practices. | Confirm the accelerator meets specific organizational requirements and that the team can operate and maintain the deployment. |
| Custom build | When requirements, existing skills, or operating constraints call for a tailored implementation. | Account for the time and ongoing capacity needed to design, deploy, and maintain the custom foundation. |
Microsoft’s landing zone overview and design principles provide the reference point for either path.
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