Azure Landing Zone

1. Purpose of Azure Landing Zone

• Provides governance, security, and compliance guardrails before workloads are deployed.

• Standardizes network, identity, and resource organization across all environments.

• Ensures BFSI regulatory compliance (RBI, SEBI, GDPR, PCI-DSS).

• Enables scalability, multi-region disaster recovery, and microservices readiness.

2. Core Building Blocks of the Azure Landing Zone

Here are the main layers you should define for digital lending:

a) Identity & Access Management

• Azure AD → central identity provider for users, apps, and services.

• Enable Conditional Access Policies (MFA, risk-based access).

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) aligned with lending business roles (Loan Officer, Underwriter, Risk Analyst, Customer Service, etc.).

• Integration with existing enterprise identity provider (if applicable).

• Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for sensitive roles (e.g., DB Admin).

• RBAC policies aligned with pods (KYC pod, Loan pod, Collections pod).

b) Network Topology & Connectivity

• Hub-Spoke Model:

  • Hub → Shared services (firewall, monitoring, API Gateway).

  • Spokes → Individual workloads (Lending microservices, KYC, Credit Score, Fraud detection).

• Azure Virtual WAN for global interconnect.

• NSGs (Network Security Groups) for subnet-level security.

• Private Endpoints for database and sensitive services.

• Azure Firewall + DDoS Protection Standard.

c) Resource Organization & Governance

• Use Management Groups (Enterprise → Business Unit → Workload → Environment).

• Management Groups aligned with Lending business units.

• Subscriptions for environments (Prod, UAT, Dev).

• Resource Groups per microservice domain (KYC, Loan Origination, Risk Scoring, Disbursement).

• Tagging Standards (app name, cost center, environment, owner).

• Subscriptions split by environment:

  • Landing Zone-Core (shared services).

  • Landing Zone-App (digital lending workloads).

  • Landing Zone-Data (data lakes, warehouses).

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• Azure Policy & Blueprints: enforce encryption at rest, region restrictions, allowed SKUs.

d) Security & Compliance

• Azure Key Vault → manage secrets, certificates, keys.

• Azure Security Center (Defender for Cloud) → continuous compliance monitoring.

• Customer Lockbox & Data Residency → BFSI compliance.

• Logs routed to Log Analytics + Sentinel for fraud detection & SIEM.

• Azure Policy for compliance (PCI DSS, GDPR, RBI/SEBI guidelines).

• Key Vault for secrets, API keys, encryption keys.

• Defender for Cloud for threat protection.

• Sentinel (SIEM/SOAR) for real-time monitoring & incident response.

• Managed Identities for microservices.

e) Data & Integration

• Data Landing Zone pattern:

  • Raw Zone → Ingested KYC docs, loan forms.

  • Curated Zone → Processed and validated customer/loan data.

  • Consumption Zone → Reports, dashboards, ML models.

• Data movement: Azure Event Hubs / Kafka, Data Factory, Synapse.

• Integration: API Management + Service Bus for event-driven flow.

• Azure SQL / PostgreSQL (PaaS) for structured lending data.

• Cosmos DB for event-driven, document-oriented data (loan applications, transactions).

• Data Lake Gen2 for analytics & ML models (fraud detection, credit scoring).

• Blob Storage for documents (KYC files, agreements).

• Encryption at Rest + In Transit enforced.

f) Observability

• Azure Monitor + Log Analytics + Application Insights → end-to-end telemetry.

• Grafana/Prometheus on AKS → microservice metrics.

• End-user experience monitoring for loan journeys.

g) Compute & Application Services

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for microservices deployment.

• Istio/NGINX Service Mesh for service-to-service security & observability.

• Azure API Management as unified gateway (external & internal APIs).

• App Service for lightweight web portals.

h). Resilience & Disaster Recovery

• Multi-region deployment (South India + Central India) for HA/DR.

• Geo-redundant storage & database replication.

• Azure Site Recovery for DR automation.

• Active-Active Failover for transaction consistency in lending.

I) DevOps & Automation

• Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipelines.

• Terraform / Bicep for infra provisioning.

• Azure Monitor + Log Analytics for observability.

• Policy-as-Code to enforce compliance during pipeline execution.

• Chaos Studio for resilience testing (loan processing system uptime).

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3. Landing Zone Variants

Microsoft provides ready patterns that we tailor for BFSI/digital lending:

• Enterprise-Scale Landing Zone (best for BFSI).

• CAF (Cloud Adoption Framework) Landing Zone aligned with governance pillars.

4. Lending-Specific Tailoring

For Digital Lending, the landing zone should explicitly support:

• Multi-region Active-Active (e.g., South India + Central India for RBI compliance).

• High isolation of KYC/PII workloads in dedicated spokes.

• Fraud detection AI models deployed with GPU-enabled AKS nodes.

• Data Sovereignty Controls ensuring no PII leaves India region.

• Audit & Forensics Workspace (mandatory for lending disputes).

✅ In short:The Azure Landing Zone for Digital Lending = Identity + Network + Security + Data + Observability + Governance, tuned for BFSI compliance, microservices, and AI-driven lending workflows.

Digital Lending Landing Zone

[Enterprise Landing Zone Foundation]

→ Identity & Access (Azure AD, RBAC, MFA)

→ Networking (Hub-Spoke VNet, Firewall, NSG, ExpressRoute)

→ Security & Compliance (Azure Policy, Key Vault, Defender, Sentinel)

→ Resource Org (Mgmt Groups, Subscriptions, Resource Groups, Tags)

→ Data Layer (Azure SQL/Postgres, Cosmos DB, Data Lake, Blob Storage)

→ Application Layer (AKS, API Gateway, App Service, Service Mesh)

→ DevOps & Automation (Azure DevOps, Terraform, Monitor, Log Analytics)

→ Resilience & DR (Multi-Region, GRS, Site Recovery, Active-Active)

✅ This Landing Zone ensures your Digital Lending Platform is:

• Secure (regulatory compliance)

• Scalable (microservices + cloud-native)

• Governed (policies, cost control)

• Resilient (multi-region, HA/DR)