Key highlights
4 weeks
Design and implementation of the AWS cloud landing zone
8+
Key solution components delivered, from automation to guardrails
Summary
One of the largest American cities partnered with Zensar to migrate its infrastructure to AWS, giving city departments the agility, elasticity, and self-service capabilities needed to modernize services. A three-day compliance workshop and three weeks of design and implementation delivered a secure, automated, multi-account AWS landing zone, helping the city join the league of smart cities while reducing the effort and cost of maintaining its IT environment.
Client overview
One of the largest American cities saw its population and businesses grow, along with rising demands for higher living standards and reliable city services. The city needed to manage its operations with minimal business hurdles as it prepared for further growth and expansion. Zensar's brief was to migrate the city's existing infrastructure to the cloud so it could adopt new technologies faster and more efficiently, better orchestrate its departments, streamline processes and communication across the city network, and lay the groundwork for its future technological state.
Challenges
Rising demand to transform city services
The city's IT organization faced a growing need for a flexible, scalable environment to support some of its key business workloads, while parts of its legacy infrastructure were limiting performance, agility, and the ability to scale with departmental demand.
It had to ensure proactive compliance with regulations and meet strict security and governance requirements.
Solution
Cloud onboarding with customized automation
Zensar conducted a three-day customized workshop to gather the city's compliance standards, followed by three weeks of design and implementation. The engagement covered AWS multi-account creation, networking, and automation; custom automation for account factory add-ons; and self-service capabilities for provisioning AWS services, including tagging strategies, custom VPC and transit gateway automation, Okta and Sumo Logic integrations, a service catalog, and best-practice guardrails.
Multi-account AWS landing zone
Established AWS multi-account creation, networking, and automation for a scalable, secure cloud foundation.
Custom VPC and transit gateway automation
Automated custom virtual private cloud (VPC) setup and AWS Transit Gateway implementation.
Identity and log integration
Designed and automated Okta integration and Sumo Logic integration with central AWS audit logs.
Service Catalog and guardrails
Implemented a service catalog with pre-built products and workflows, along with best-practice guardrails.
Solution enablers
Amazon Control Tower
Offered the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment.
Amazon Service Catalog
Helped create and manage approved IaC templates so teams could discover self-service cloud resources.
Proactive and reactive tagging
Implemented tagging strategies to improve governance, cost visibility, and resource tracking.
Account factory automation
Custom automation for account factory add-ons enabled fast, self-service account provisioning.
Business impact
A better place to live, work, and thrive
Streamlined operations
Streamlined data processing and communication across city departments.
Stronger security and compliance
Strengthened security, compliance, and governance across the AWS environment.
Automated account creation
Fully automated account creation, completed in minutes.
Self-service provisioning
Enabled ease of self-provisioning and updates to existing accounts.
Business outcomes
Scalability and agility on demand: Elastic AWS infrastructure lets departments scale business workloads up or down as demand changes, without waiting on hardware procurement.
Improved performance and reliability: Moving key workloads off aging legacy infrastructure improves application performance, availability, and resilience for city services.
Stronger security and compliance: Cloud-native security, governance, and monitoring controls help the city meet regulatory requirements proactively and strengthen its overall security posture.
Optimized IT costs: Pay-as-you-go consumption reduces capital spend on hardware refresh and data center upkeep, shifting the city to a more predictable, usage-based cost model.
Foundation for smart-city innovation: A modern cloud platform positions the city to adopt analytics, automation, and new digital services faster, supporting its smart-city ambitions.
