What is the Azure landing zone and how is it structured?

An Azure landing zone is a pre-configured, standardized environment that follows best practices for security, governance, networking, and identity at scale. It is the foundation for a cloud adoption strategy. Built using Management Groups (organize subscriptions), Azure Policy (enforce standards), RBAC (access control), Network topology (Hub-and-Spoke with shared services VNet), and Logging (centralized Log Analytics). The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework provides a reference architecture with platform landing zones (identity, management, connectivity subscriptions) and application landing zones (per workload subscriptions). The ALZ Bicep/Terraform accelerators deploy the full landing zone as code. It ensures consistency across a large organization's Azure estate from day one.