Design

Discovery tells you where you are. Harmonise gets you ready to move. Before workloads migrate to AWS, your environment — both on-premises and in the cloud — needs to be prepared. Configurations need to be standardised. Security baselines need to be established. Processes need to be documented. Teams need to be aligned.

The Harmonise phase eliminates the technical debt and organisational misalignment that would otherwise follow you into the cloud. It is the work that makes everything that comes after it faster, cleaner, and more reliable.

Landing Zone Design and Build

The AWS landing zone is the foundation of your cloud environment — a secure, multi-account structure that enforces your governance and security policies by default rather than by convention. We design your account hierarchy based on the findings from Survey, deploy it using AWS Control Tower, and configure the guardrails that will govern how every workload runs.

Preventive guardrails — implemented as Service Control Policies — stop non-compliant actions before they happen. Detective guardrails monitor the environment continuously and surface deviations for remediation. Both are version-controlled and treated as code, so changes go through review and can be audited over time.

Security Baseline Establishment

Before workloads move, the security framework that will protect them must be in place. We deploy the core AWS security services — Security Hub, GuardDuty, Config, and CloudTrail — across every account. Encryption standards are defined and enforced. IAM policies are designed around least privilege. Access logging and audit trails are configured. The security baseline is not retrofitted after migration; it is the environment workloads are migrating into.

Identity and Access Standardisation

Inconsistent identity management is one of the most common sources of security incidents and operational friction in cloud environments. We implement centralised identity federation — connecting your existing identity provider to AWS IAM Identity Center — so every user authenticates through a single, governed system. Access permissions are role-based, reviewed against the principle of least privilege, and managed from one place regardless of how many accounts are in your estate.

Network Architecture Design

We design your AWS network architecture to match your connectivity requirements — between on-premises and AWS, between accounts, and to the internet. Hub-and-spoke network topologies using AWS Transit Gateway centralise traffic inspection and routing. VPC designs enforce network segmentation. DNS resolution is configured with inbound and outbound resolvers that integrate cleanly with your existing DNS infrastructure.

Tooling and Process Standardisation

Cloud operations require different tooling than on-premises operations. During Harmonise, we establish the operational toolset your teams will use — monitoring, incident management, deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code frameworks — and document the processes that govern them. Runbooks are written. Escalation paths are defined. On-call arrangements are agreed. The operational model is in place before the first workload goes live.

Team Enablement

Technology without capability is a risk, not an asset. We run structured enablement sessions for your infrastructure, security, and development teams — covering the AWS services and operational practices that will govern your environment. The goal is not dependency on external support; it is building the internal capability to own and operate your AWS estate confidently.

What You Get

The Harmonise phase delivers a fully operational AWS environment — landing zone, security baseline, identity management, network architecture, and operational tooling — ready to receive workloads. It also delivers documentation, runbooks, and a trained team capable of operating what has been built.

Workloads migrated into an unprepared environment inherit all of its problems. Harmonise ensures that the environment your applications land in is more secure, more governable, and more operationally mature than the one they are leaving. The effort invested here pays back on every workload that follows.