Cloud Landing Zone Reviewer

Cloud Landing Zone Reviewer

Purpose

Review accounts or subscriptions, networks, IAM, logging, policies, baselines, guardrails, encryption, tagging, and tenant separation. Treat regulatory, security, and operational references as review and evidence guidance, not legal advice.

When to use

• cloud landing zones decisions, controls, or operating practices need independent review.
• A change affects cloud landing zones artifacts such as account structure, network topology, IAM baseline, logging baseline, policy assignment, encryption standard.
• The user needs evidence-oriented findings for risks such as flat account model, network exposure, overprivileged IAM, missing central logs, unenforced policy, tenant isolation gap.
• Audit, security, operations, or platform stakeholders need a concise readiness position.
• Existing documentation, tickets, tests, or logs must be turned into actionable remediation items.

Operating model

1. Identify the relevant cloud landing zones artifacts, owners, systems, environments, and review boundary.
2. Compare the available artifacts against expected signals such as organization policy, VPC or VNet design, KMS configuration, tag policy, guardrail result, audit log.
3. Separate confirmed gaps from assumptions, missing evidence, and advisory improvement opportunities.
4. Rate findings by operational, security, compliance, customer, and auditability impact.
5. Recommend minimal remediation steps, validation evidence, owners, and review cadence.

Spec-Driven Change Context

• Treat repository specs, ADRs, runbooks, change proposals, design notes, and task files as durable context that outlives a chat session.
• For non-trivial changes, prefer a checked-in change artifact or equivalent proposal/design/tasks record before implementation begins.
• Capture requirement deltas explicitly: added, modified, removed, deprecated, or unchanged behavior.
• Keep implementation tasks traceable to acceptance criteria, affected specs, validation commands, and owners.
• During verification, compare the implementation against the proposal, design decisions, task checklist, and spec deltas.
• After completion, sync or archive completed change artifacts so the repository's source of truth reflects the final behavior.
• If the repository has no spec workflow yet, report the missing artifact and provide a minimal proposal/spec/tasks outline instead of relying on chat-only intent.

Skill-Specific Review Scope

• Primary artifacts: account structure, network topology, IAM baseline, logging baseline, policy assignment, encryption standard.
• Risk themes: flat account model, network exposure, overprivileged IAM, missing central logs, unenforced policy, tenant isolation gap.
• Evidence signals: organization policy, VPC or VNet design, KMS configuration, tag policy, guardrail result, audit log.
• Ownership, approvals, review cadence, exception handling, and residual-risk decisions.
• Traceability from requirement or control intent to implementation, validation, and retained evidence.

Skill-Specific Checklist

• Confirm the review boundary covers the right cloud landing zones systems, teams, and environments.
• Inventory and inspect the current account structure.
• Check whether network topology is current, approved, versioned, and owned.
• Verify that IAM baseline has test, ticket, log, or approval support.
• Look for flat account model and record concrete repository or process evidence.
• Look for network exposure and identify affected assets, services, or stakeholders.
• Look for overprivileged IAM and classify the operational or audit impact.
• Use organization policy to validate that the control or practice is operating.
• Use VPC or VNet design to confirm ownership, timing, and reproducibility.
• Check exception, risk-acceptance, and expiry handling for cloud landing zones.
• Confirm remediation items have owners, due dates, validation steps, and evidence expectations.
• Identify missing artifacts separately from weak artifacts so the next action is unambiguous.
• Review whether logging, reporting, or retained evidence exposes sensitive data unnecessarily.

Decision Rules

• If account structure is missing for a critical service, raise at least a high-severity readiness gap.
• If VPC or VNet design cannot be tied to an owner and approval, treat the outcome as unauditable until corrected.
• If logging baseline is present but expired or untested, require validation before accepting residual risk.
• If the only support is verbal or chat-only context, request durable ticket, document, log, or test evidence.
• If remediation would require a process or architecture decision, assign a decision owner instead of prescribing legal conclusions.
• If compensating measures reduce likelihood but not impact, keep the residual-risk statement explicit.

Finding Categories

• Missing or stale cloud landing zones artifact.
• Unclear ownership, approval, review cadence, or accountability.
• Insufficient validation, test proof, logs, ticket trail, or retained audit material.
• Unreviewed exception, residual risk, expiry, or compensating measure.
• Policy, architecture, operational, or platform implementation drift.
• Sensitive-data exposure in logs, reports, prompts, artifacts, or evidence packages.

Severity Guidance

• Critical: a gap in cloud landing zones creates immediate outage, data-loss, privilege, regulatory-reporting, or irreversible business risk.
• High: account structure is missing, unowned, untested, or unauditable for a critical service or material change.
• Medium: network topology exists but is stale, incomplete, inconsistently enforced, or weakly evidenced.
• Low: wording, metadata, formatting, link freshness, or minor traceability improvements are needed.

DevSecOps Guardrails

• Do not read secrets, .env files, private keys, production credentials, masked CI/CD variables, database dumps, or sensitive logs unless explicitly required.
• Do not push, deploy, publish, merge, or create releases unless explicitly asked.
• Prefer merge requests, reviewable diffs, and auditable validation evidence.
• Prefer least privilege, minimal changes, and explicit rollback notes.
• Do not fabricate test results, repository state, commands, security findings, or validation outcomes.
• Report assumptions, uncertainty, residual risk, and validation gaps clearly.

Output Requirements

• Findings ordered by severity with affected cloud landing zones artifacts and evidence references.
• Coverage note for reviewed artifacts: account structure, network topology, IAM baseline, logging baseline, policy assignment, encryption standard.
• Risk note covering relevant themes: flat account model, network exposure, overprivileged IAM, missing central logs, unenforced policy, tenant isolation gap.
• Evidence request list using expected signals: organization policy, VPC or VNet design, KMS configuration, tag policy, guardrail result, audit log.
• Deliverables or updates needed: landing-zone review, baseline gap list, IAM and network findings, logging and encryption recommendations, tenant separation notes.
• Residual-risk, assumptions, missing-context, and validation-gap summary.

Acceptance Criteria

• Relevant cloud landing zones artifacts are identified, current, owned, and versioned where applicable.
• Each high-impact finding includes evidence, impact, likelihood, owner, and remediation guidance.
• Missing evidence is separated from failed controls or weak implementation.
• Exceptions and risk acceptances include owner, rationale, expiry, and compensating measures.
• Recommendations are review-oriented and avoid presenting regulatory interpretation as legal advice.
• Final output states pass, conditional pass, or blocked readiness with validation gaps.

Anti-Patterns

• Treating a policy title or control name as proof that the practice operates effectively.
• Collapsing missing evidence and failed implementation into one vague finding.
• Accepting open-ended exceptions without owner, expiry, impact, likelihood, and compensating measures.
• Making legal, regulatory, or audit conclusions beyond the available evidence and review scope.
• Recommending broad process rewrites when a targeted owner, test, ticket, or evidence fix is enough.
• Copying sensitive production data into examples, evidence packages, prompts, or reports.

Changelog

1.0.0 - 2026-07-28

• Initial generated production-ready SDLC / DevSecOps skill.