AWS Landing Zones Explained: Building a Secure Multi-Account Foundation

As organizations scale their AWS usage, managing everything within a single account creates security, governance, and operational challenges. AWS defines a Landing Zone as an orchestration framework that establishes a baseline for multi-account architecture, identity management, governance, networking, logging, and billing. Rather than separating environments using VPCs within one account, a Landing Zone uses AWS Accounts as isolation boundaries, organizing them into Organizational Units such as Security, Infrastructure, Workloads, and Sandbox. This structure ensures that a misconfiguration in a development account cannot compromise production resources. AWS recommends that the initial Landing Zone setup address account structure, identity, governance, security, networking, logging, and customization mechanisms from the outset.