Moving to the cloud can be a daunting prospect for any organisation, and to remove that fear there are several key questions that every business needs to answer before they start their journey:

• What should I migrate?
• How should I do it?
• How do I manage costs?

But if you’re a not for profit organisation, the questions just keep coming:

• How can you ensure value is being found from your vital funding?
• Will there be disruption to vital support for service users?
• How can you complete a cloud migration with the limited resources many charities have?

To be able to proceed confidently you need a secure and safe starting point. A platform that you know will help you to make a positive change within your organisation and an expert partner to support your journey without exposing your organisation to risk.

A place from which you can take advantage of the vast possibilities in the cloud to transform the digital capabilities of your organisation. You need a safe landing zone and an expert partner to help you build it.

What are Landing Zones?

Landing zones are one of the first stages in Microsoft’s recommended Cloud Adoption Framework. Designed to help you build your own scalable Azure platform, the Azure Landing Zone is designed to give you a platform to build the scalable environment you want in Azure whilst meeting security and governance goals.

So how can the Landing Zone concept be applied to charities looking for growth in the cloud?

Get the Basic Building Blocks In Place

The landing zone concept refers to an environment that has been provisioned and prepared to host the essential workloads that you will be moving into Azure. In simple terms, this means making sure that you have ready the compute, network, storage and data you will need to successfully scale up in the cloud.

For not for profit organisations this could mean starting from the key services you provide to the people you engage with and working backwards from there.

For example, if your organisation works in social care, what are the applications that staff making visits require and what resources need to be applied to keep them working? If you have a webchat service that can be a key first port of call for people who need help, how can you make it more efficient and effective by hosting it in Azure?

Build Governance From The Start

Effective governance is vital in any not for profit organisation, and nothing changes when looking to scale in Azure! Keeping track of the access, costs and security of your Azure environment is perhaps the key component of building a scalable and trusted platform for growth.

In the landing zone process, this means creating a clear plan for costs, access control, subscription level policies and more. For many not for profits this means the senior IT decision-maker working with a partner such as Cloud Direct as an Azure Expert MSP to ensure this is consistently built into the platform.

Understand The Risks But Avoid The Myths!

There are many myths about moving infrastructure to the cloud, many of which contribute to organisations holding themselves back from scaling their environments in Azure.

These myths can be particularly effective in the not for profit sector, where budgets and teams are tight and all resources are focused on the achievement of the overall mission.

The Azure Landing Zone process helps you to manage these concerns and make decisions based on the facts available. If something isn’t viable to move into the cloud yet, keep it out of the Landing Zone and build your hybrid strategy. For the other aspects of your infrastructure, our experts can work with you to optimise them for a scalable future in the cloud – with clarity on the costs and performance that give you the facts instead of the myths.

 Like what you hear and ready to learn more? Download our landing zones webinar today!

Our Azure Expert, Matt Leach, shows why landing zones are one of the first stages in Microsoft’s recommended Cloud Adoption Framework.

In this webinar we explore:

• What are Azure landing zones?
• How do landing zones help to achieve your security and governance goals?
• Building your scalable Azure platform