AWS Landing Zone Checklist for Growing Philippine Companies

What a landing zone is, and why it comes first

AWS describes a landing zone as a well-architected, multi-account environment that is scalable and secure. In practice it is the set of decisions every later workload inherits: how accounts are organized, how people sign in, where logs go, which actions are blocked, how networks connect and how costs are tracked.

AWS Control Tower automates a common baseline and is a sensible default for many organizations. You can also build the same design with AWS Organizations and infrastructure as code. The tool matters less than the decisions and the fact that someone owns them after launch.

Setting this up before production is much cheaper than retrofitting it. Moving live systems between accounts, re-addressing networks that overlap with your offices, or discovering that audit logs were never kept all mean downtime and rework later.

1. Account structure

An AWS account is a hard boundary for permissions, billing and many service limits. Use several accounts, grouped into organizational units (OUs) so policies apply consistently.

Accounts themselves cost nothing; resources inside them do. Start small and add accounts as teams and applications grow.

2. Identity and access

• Use IAM Identity Center connected to your existing directory, such as Microsoft Entra ID or Google Workspace, so joiners and leavers are handled in one place.
• Enforce MFA for everyone, and give administrators phishing-resistant methods such as security keys.
• Create permission sets by role (read-only, operations, developer, billing) and grant them per account.
• Avoid long-lived IAM user access keys. Use roles and temporary credentials for people and workloads.
• Protect the root user of every account: strong unique password, MFA, no access keys and a documented break-glass procedure.
• Review who has access to production accounts at least quarterly.

3. Logging and evidence

• Create an organization-wide AWS CloudTrail trail that delivers to a bucket in the log archive account, with versioning and restricted access. S3 Object Lock adds protection against deletion.
• Record configuration history with AWS Config so you can see what changed and when.
• Enable Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub across the organization, administered from the security tooling account.
• Set log retention periods from your legal, contractual and audit requirements, not from default settings.
• Decide who reviews alerts, how quickly and where findings are tracked. Unread alerts are not a control.

4. Guardrails

Preventive guardrails block actions outright; in AWS these are usually service control policies (SCPs). Detective guardrails report drift, typically through AWS Config rules and Security Hub controls. Useful first guardrails include:

• Deny disabling or deleting CloudTrail, AWS Config and GuardDuty.
• Restrict usage to the Regions you have approved.
• Turn on S3 Block Public Access at the account level.
• Require encryption for storage and database services.
• Enforce cost allocation tags with tag policies.

SCPs can break deployments in surprising ways. Apply them to a test OU first, then to production OUs, and keep a short written explanation of each one.

5. Network foundations

• Plan IP ranges that do not overlap with your offices, data centers, partners or future acquisitions. Overlaps are painful to fix once systems are live.
• Use a hub-and-spoke design with AWS Transit Gateway once you have more than a few VPCs.
• Start hybrid connectivity with Site-to-Site VPN. Consider AWS Direct Connect, usually through a connectivity partner, when throughput, consistency or data transfer costs justify it.
• Decide whether internet egress and traffic inspection are centralized or per account.
• Plan DNS between on-premises and AWS early; Route 53 Resolver endpoints handle hybrid name resolution.
• Enable VPC Flow Logs for the networks that matter.

6. Choosing a Region

Test latency from your offices and customers before committing, check that the services you need are available, and compare prices. For organizations in the Philippines, nearby Asia Pacific Regions are the usual candidates.

The Data Privacy Act does not prohibit processing personal data outside the country, but your organization remains accountable for protecting it wherever it is processed, including by providers. Some contracts and regulated sectors, such as banking, add their own requirements on outsourcing and data location. Confirm those before choosing.

7. Cost controls from day one

• Create AWS Budgets with alerts for every account, including sandboxes.
• Require tags for owner, environment, application and cost center.
• Review Cost Explorer monthly with the people who own the spend.
• Schedule non-production resources to stop outside working hours when nothing depends on them.

8. Backup and recovery

• Define AWS Backup policies centrally and apply them by tag.
• Copy backups to a separate backup account, and optionally another Region, so a compromised workload account cannot delete them.
• Use AWS Backup Vault Lock for backups that must not be deleted early.
• Agree recovery time and recovery point objectives per workload, and test restores against them.

9. Operating the landing zone

Name an owner. Make changes through code with peer review, whether with Control Tower's Account Factory, CloudFormation or Terraform. Define how new accounts are requested and approved, keep a short design record, and review guardrails and exceptions every few months.

A practical sequence

1. Agree the account structure, OUs and naming conventions.
2. Set up AWS Organizations or Control Tower in your home Region.
3. Connect your identity provider and enforce MFA.
4. Enable organization-wide logging and security services.
5. Test guardrails in a non-production OU, then apply them widely.
6. Build the network hub and hybrid connectivity.
7. Configure budgets, tag policies and backup policies.
8. Move one low-risk pilot workload and adjust what it reveals.
9. Document the design and hand it to its owner.

Common mistakes

• Running workloads in the management account.
• Sharing one administrator login between several people.
• IP ranges that overlap with office networks.
• Keeping audit logs in the same account an attacker would compromise.
• Applying guardrails without testing them.
• Nobody owning the landing zone after the project ends.