EXPERTISE / CLOUD

Azure platform engineering and cloud architecture.

Landing zones, workload platforms, identity, networking and governance on Microsoft Azure — engineered to the Well-Architected Framework and delivered entirely as code.

What we deliver

Azure architecture, landing zones and workload platforms designed for security, reliability and cost — expressed as code and operable by your team.

Platforms are products

A cloud platform succeeds when application teams can use it easily and safely. We design platforms around the workloads they serve, with paved paths for common needs and guardrails that prevent the expensive mistakes.

Landing zones sized to the organisation

We apply the Azure Landing Zone and Cloud Adoption Framework patterns pragmatically: a small organisation does not need an enterprise-scale hierarchy on day one, but it does need clean subscription boundaries, identity, policy and a path to grow.

• Management group and subscription design aligned to ownership and billing
• Hub-and-spoke or Virtual WAN networking, private endpoints and DNS — only where justified
• Azure Policy baselines for regions, SKUs, tagging, encryption and diagnostic settings
• Identity-first access with Microsoft Entra ID, Privileged Identity Management and managed identities

Choosing the right hosting model

We match compute to workload rather than defaulting to the most powerful option: Static Web Apps and Functions for light, spiky traffic; App Service for conventional web apps; Container Apps for containerised services without cluster management; AKS when teams need Kubernetes control and can operate it.

Reference platform architecture

A typical Azure workload platform we deliver is composed of well-understood building blocks, each with a clear owner and policy baseline.

• Edge: Azure Front Door with WAF policies, managed certificates and global routing
• Compute: App Service, Azure Functions, Container Apps or AKS with KEDA autoscaling — chosen per workload
• Identity: Microsoft Entra ID, managed identities, Conditional Access and Privileged Identity Management for administrative access
• Network: hub-and-spoke or Virtual WAN, Private Link for PaaS services, Azure Firewall where egress control is required
• Data: Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Storage and PostgreSQL Flexible Server with encryption, backup and geo-replication as required
• Operations: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Managed Grafana and Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Security and governance controls

Guardrails are enforced by the platform rather than by documentation.

• Azure Policy initiatives for allowed regions and SKUs, mandatory tags, TLS 1.2+, private endpoints and diagnostic settings
• Zero standing access: just-in-time elevation through PIM; no shared administrative accounts
• Secretless workloads: managed identities and workload identity federation instead of keys and connection strings
• Continuous posture management with Defender for Cloud recommendations tracked to closure

Reliability and FinOps

Reliability and cost are designed together. We define service-level objectives and recovery objectives (RPO/RTO) per workload, design for failure with availability zones, retries and tested restores, and validate resilience with Azure Chaos Studio where appropriate. Cost is made visible through tagging, budgets, anomaly alerts, reservations and savings plans, and regular right-sizing reviews aligned with FinOps Foundation practices.

Problems we address

• Cloud estates that grew organically and are now hard to govern or secure
• Unclear or rising Azure costs with little attribution
• Inconsistent environments that make releases risky
• Identity and network designs that block teams rather than protect them

Technologies and approaches

• Microsoft Azure
• Azure Landing Zones and Cloud Adoption Framework
• Azure Well-Architected Framework
• Terraform and Bicep
• Microsoft Entra ID and managed identities
• Azure Policy
• Azure Monitor
• Container Apps and AKS

Typical engagement activities

• Well-Architected and security review of existing workloads
• Landing zone and subscription design
• Identity, network and governance design
• Infrastructure-as-code implementation
• Cost analysis, budgets and optimisation

Deliverables

• Target platform architecture with decision records
• Reusable infrastructure-as-code modules
• Policy and governance baseline
• Cost model and budget alerting
• Operational and onboarding documentation

Potential business outcomes

• Consistent, reproducible environments
• Lower security risk through least-privilege identity and policy
• Predictable, attributable cloud spend
• Faster onboarding for new workloads

Contact: contact@nexaarislabs.com

Nexaaris Labs Ltd is a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 16746745. Registered office: 2 Shepton Road, Broughton, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK10 7AH, United Kingdom.