Preparing your Azure landing zones for cost and operational excellence

After establishing your strategy and governance plans, you’re set for a pivotal phase in Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) – the Ready phase. This segment focuses on constructing the essential groundwork for your entire cloud infrastructure, commonly referred to as your landing zones.

Landing zones determine how workloads are deployed, secured, monitored, and governed. However, teams often concentrate solely on technical readiness, such as networking, identity, and security, while overlooking a crucial aspect: cost readiness.

This is where Turbo360 becomes essential. It guarantees that your landing zones are financially optimized, governed, and prepared for FinOps from day one.

Read Part 3 of this series: How to approach the planning phase in Cloud Adoption Framework?

The CAF Ready Phase: Establishing a Foundation for Scalability and Control

According to Microsoft’s CAF, the Ready phase encompasses the following tasks:

1. Designing and deploying Azure landing zones.
2. Implementing governance and compliance measures.
3. Validating identity, networking, and policy baselines.
4. Preparing your organization for effective operational management.

The aim is to ensure Azure is ready for adoption from both a technical and organisational perspective. However, true readiness includes visibility into costs, financial guardrails, and automated governance right from the start.

Turbo360’s Contribution to the Ready Phase

Turbo360 enhances your landing zone readiness by extending beyond compliance and security to emphasise FinOps and operational excellence.

It ensures that every subscription, resource group, and environment is imbued with cost awareness, automation, and monitoring, empowering your teams to deploy confidently without compromising financial control.

Integrate Cost Visibility into Every Landing Zone

CAF Goal: Ensure that all new environments are observable and accountable.

Turbo360 Solution:

• Configure Custom Scopes that align with your landing zone architecture, such as management groups, environments, or business units.
• Connect each landing zone to Cost Analyzer dashboards for immediate visibility into expenditures.
• Utilise Tag Manager automation to enforce financial tagging for all new resources.

For instance, when a new “Production” landing zone is established, Turbo360 automatically implements your FinOps baseline—scopes, tags, budgets, and dashboards—ensuring cost transparency from the initial deployment.

Automate Operational Policies

CAF Goal: Enforce standards without hindering innovation.

Turbo360 Solution:

• Employ Automation & Scheduler for repetitive cost-related tasks, such as deactivating idle VMs, cleaning up unused disks, or removing orphaned resources.
• Schedule budget updates, data synchronisations, and compliance checks to maintain current status.

This results in your landing zones evolving into self-governing ecosystems with automated measures that keep costs in check and compliance maintained.

Validate Readiness with Anomaly Detection

CAF Goal: Identify risks prior to affecting production.

Turbo360 Solution:

• Utilise Anomaly Detection to spot unexpected cost spikes as workloads are tested.
• Benchmark standard expenditure patterns during pilot deployments.
• Automatically notify owners when anomalies surpass defined thresholds.

This allows you to identify configuration errors, runaway resources, or inefficiencies early on, preventing them from escalating into significant financial or operational issues.

Secure and Govern Cost Access

CAF Goal: Ensure roles and permissions align with governance requirements.

Turbo360 Solution:

• Utilise Permission Manager to apply least privilege access to financial data.
• Create custom roles allowing developers to view their team’s spending without accessing sensitive corporate financials.
• Limit access for users strictly to the FinOps scopes pertinent to them.

This aligns seamlessly with CAF’s Identity & Access Management principle while extending it to encompass financial governance.

Embed Cost Readiness in Landing Zone Design

CAF Goal: Standardise and automate deployments.

Turbo360 Solution:

• Turbo360 can seamlessly integrate with your Azure Blueprint or Bicep deployment templates, simplifying setup from day one.
• Automatically register new subscriptions or resource groups within Turbo360 scopes during deployment.
• Implement standardised cost monitoring and alerting across all environments.

As a result, every new landing zone inherently adopts your FinOps baseline, ensuring that cost visibility, automation, and compliance grow alongside your infrastructure.

A Real-World Example

A global Managed Service Provider (MSP) deploying multi-tenant Azure environments employed Turbo360 to refine their CAF landing zones.

They incorporated Turbo360 automation into each new subscription so that:

• Tag compliance was enforced automatically.
• Cost dashboards and alerts were set up instantly.
• Idle resource cleanup schedules were implemented by default.

Within days, they achieved complete automation of cost governance, eliminating the need for manual setups, curbing unnecessary expenditure, and ensuring every landing zone was FinOps-ready from day one.

Why This Matters

In many organisations, cost management only begins after workloads go live, by which point inefficiencies are often entrenched.

By integrating Turbo360 into your CAF Ready phase, you proactively incorporate FinOps, making cost optimisation a foundational principle rather than an oversight.

• Landing zones transform into self-governing entities.
• Budgets and cost transparency scale effortlessly.
• Finance and engineering possess a unified dashboard from the outset.

What’s Next?

With your landing zones now secure, compliant, and cost-prepared, the next CAF stage marks the commencement of actual adoption—migration and innovation.

In Part 5 of this series, we’ll delve into:

Adopting Azure with Transparency: How Turbo360 Ensures Cost Control During Migration & Innovation.

We will examine how Turbo360 aids teams in managing migration expenses, monitoring expenditures in real-time, and aligning innovation with financial objectives.

Final Thoughts

Simply being technically ready is insufficient.

True cloud readiness entails being equipped to govern, automate, and optimise costs from day one.

Turbo360 transforms your CAF landing zones into FinOps-enabled foundations—melding governance, visibility, and automation for a more streamlined and financially efficient journey to Azure.

Don’t merely construct landing zones—establish cost-ready foundations.