October 31, 2024
An AWS Landing Zone Relieves On-Premises Overutilization
With large upcoming projects demanding bandwidth, read how a scalable, well-architected workload environment helped a company’s rapid growth continue.
Automating manual processes for scalability and cost optimization
49%
percentage of cloud decision-makers who choose Amazon Web Services for significant workloads — #1 among all providers1
47%
percentage of organizations expected to utilize cloud-hosted infrastructure as their disaster recovery site by 20262
Can a growing company quickly deploy scalable cloud architecture?
A REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
Deploying a Scalable Architecture Solution on a Short Timeframe
A systems integration provider specializing in industrial automation applications needed to relieve its on-premises environment from significant utilization. The project was time-sensitive, with scalability and cost optimization the biggest priorities since this fast-growing company had large upcoming projects demanding bandwidth.
THE TURNING POINT
Leveraging IaC to Deploy an AWS Landing Zone
CDW engineers and architects leveraged Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to deploy an Amazon Web Services (AWS) landing zone (LZ) aligned with AWS best practices and a mutually agreed-upon design, which included:
- Control tower operations, including the creation of OUs, AWS accounts, and the enabling of security policies and guardrails
- Integration of AWS IAM with Okta
- Using CloudFormation templates to deploy AWS resources, including FortiGate firewalls
- Migrating VMs to AWS using the Application Migration Service
THE RESULTS
An AWS Landing Zone Enables an On-Time Arrival
CDW and AWS helped the company relieve its utilization constraints with a scalable solution that helped automate manual processes. This well-architected AWS landing zone enables the company to support rapid deployments or migrations into AWS.
Here’s why it worked:
- CDW’s discovery-and-design workstream focused on identifying and aligning the foundational components in AWS that make up the solution design.
- The LZ was deployed as designed, utilizing Infrastructure as Code.
- CDW delivered a half-day Windows EC2 instance lifecycle workshop to introduce the AWS principles of machine imaging, managing, patching, monitoring and tagging.
What’s next?
Once the deployment was complete, CDW validated that the LZ was built as expected and delivered it for operation. The systems integration provider now has the capacity to continue its rapid growth without concern that its on-premises environment will be overutilized.
Sources:
1 Flexera, “2024 State of the Cloud Report,” May 2024
2 Veeam, “Data Protection Trends Report 2024”