Landing Zone: how to accelerate the adoption of public cloud with OVHcloud

Introduction

As part of a project of mutual interest between OVHcloud and Sopra Steria, the technical teams of each company joined forces to design the deployment of a Landing Zone. Initially, the project was designed and adapted to the needs of the public sector, to be later expanded to other markets and use cases.

Why a Landing Zone?

Compliance and regulatory requirements

The starting point of the project was very specific: from day one, the Canadian government required a cloud environment that meets very strict sovereignty and security standards. Without a ready-to-use solution, each public client had to spend weeks, if not months, setting up their architecture, drafting procedures, and validating each component with the authorities. This created a bottleneck when projects were initiated.

“The lack of a process to deploy a Landing Zone that was compliant with the requirements of the Canadian public sector was a real roadblock.”

The Landing Zone was designed as a deployment that complies with a regulatory framework: the created infrastructure automatically meets the segmentation, encryption, logging, and access control requirements imposed by authorities. Clients no longer have to worry about how to prove that their environment is compliant; the compliance report is generated simultaneously with the deployment. In fact, this is the whole idea behind the solution.

Accelerating cloud adoption

Once the compliance issue is resolved, the Landing Zone proves to be a true adoption accelerator for all types of clients: startups, SMEs, large accounts, and, of course, governments.

• Automation of best practices: the tools automatically deploy private networks, subnets, firewalls, service accounts, and IAM policies.
• Standardisation: each environment follows the same architectural model, which facilitates maintenance, monitoring, and upgrades.
• Time-to-market: where a manual deployment could take several weeks of work (reading documentation, manually creating resources, compliance testing), the Landing Zone allows for an operational (and compliant) environment in less than an hour.

“In half an hour, you have something ready to use: 30 to 40% of security requirements are already automatically deployed.”

The concrete benefits for technical teams

Time saving and reproducibility

At the core of automating a Landing Zone is Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Terraform (or its fork OpenTofu) orchestrates all OVHcloud services.
Thanks to this model:

• a single script can be executed multiple times, across different accounts or regions, without changing the outcome
• human errors that occur when manually creating resources (typographical errors, configuration oversights, incorrect role assignments) are nearly eliminated
• teams move from tedious configuration to deployment validation, freeing up several days of work for each project

Governance and access management

In addition to the infrastructure, the Landing Zone incorporates a governance model: roles, policies, and safeguards are preconfigured, simplifying access management and revoking rights when someone leaves the company. This layer of abstraction addresses one of the main challenges for IT departments: visibility and control over cloud resources.

Modularity and adaptability to different profiles

The code has been designed to be modular. Three basic profiles are available: “small business”, “medium” and “government”. Each profile activates a tailored set of services in terms of cost, scalability, and compliance requirements. 

The same code base can be extended: if a client from the financial sector requires an HSM encryption module or a certified payment gateway, it is simply a matter of adding the corresponding module and rerunning the script. This flexibility allows you to reuse the same foundation for very different projects, while ensuring compliance and performance guarantees.

A solution that makes a difference

Landing Zone is more than just scripts that create networks and accounts.

It is a comprehensive set of services that covers the entire lifecycle of a cloud project: from strategic reflection to production deployment, and then to daily management administered by the client.

OVHcloud Infrastructure	Professional Services & OVHcloud Partners
• Provides the physical (or virtual in the case of Public Cloud) infrastructure. • Provides the Public Cloud services (e.g. instances, databases, storage, private networks).	• Bring industry expertise: security audits, compliance studies, sharing of best  cloud practices. • Support the development of target governance rules for implementation (IAM policies, incident management, continuity plan). • Integration of the client’s teams (workshops, labs, ongoing training). • Provide assistance while building the Landing Zone.

This dual expertise provides coverage for the entire lifecycle: strategy → deployment → operation.

Conclusion

The Landing Zone deployed on OVHcloud infrastructures addresses two major challenges: compliance  for many regulated sectors (particularly public, finance and health) and speed of adoption  for all cloud customers. By automating part of the security requirements, offering ready-to-use governance, and remaining highly modular, it frees up technical teams to focus on their business value.

Are you responsible for a cloud project and looking to reduce your production timelines while ensuring compliance? Contact OVHcloud to find out how a Landing Zone can become the foundation of your digital transformation.