Case Studies

Growing on AWS without losing control: from a single account to a multi-account Landing Zone

This case might interest you if:

you're growing on AWS and a single account is no longer enough

you need to separate environments and workloads (dev/stage/prod) securely

you need governance, audit and compliance by design

you want to standardize provisioning and CI/CD with Infrastructure as Code

An Italian software company specializing in SaaS platforms for safety and compliance relied on AWS as the backbone of every product and service. In the early days a single AWS account had been enough: workloads, environments, users, permissions, shared resources, everything under one roof.

But the company was growing fast, and that setup was no longer keeping up. Operational risk was climbing. Governance demanded constant manual effort. Every release carried more friction than the last. The single account, once a pragmatic shortcut, had become the bottleneck.

The company approached coders51 to move past it. Together we planned a structured transition to a multi-account model, with a clear goal: preserve operational continuity while establishing repeatable standards for security, provisioning and delivery from day one.

A significant challenge because:

We had to increase segregation across environments, teams and workloads without disrupting systems already in production.

We needed to introduce centralized governance and controls while preserving operational speed and team autonomy.

The infrastructure had to become repeatable and auditable, moving past untracked manual configurations.

When a single account becomes a bottleneck

In a single account everything lives within the same perimeter: networking, identity and permissions, data, logging and operational tooling. Over time, this coexistence produces three typical effects:

1) a broad risk surface, where a human error or an overly permissive policy can impact the entire platform;

2) blurred responsibilities, with no clear boundaries on who can do what, where and why;

3) a growing difficulty in giving teams autonomy without feeding chaos.

For the people working on the platform, this translated into increasingly long and burdensome operational reviews, slower and more stressful releases, and a constant effort to maintain consistent security standards. Effort that took time away from building product.

An incremental approach, no big bang
We worked in steps: first we designed the account model and the security policies, then we built the Landing Zone, and finally we gradually migrated workloads to the new accounts.

This way, the company started seeing concrete benefits (account segregation, centralized logging) within the first weeks, without waiting for the full migration to complete.
Account model and governance: clear boundaries
Our first operational step was defining an explicit account model organized by purpose: one group of accounts dedicated to cross-cutting and shared functions, a second group for workloads and environments. This makes resource ownership explicit and allows different policies to be applied depending on context, from development to production.

We implemented governance centrally, ensuring boundaries remain stable over time and do not rely on informal practices.
Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD: repeatable standards
The second pillar was making the infrastructure programmable: reusable modules, validation pipelines, repeatable release processes. Every change goes through a repository, a review and a pipeline, with fewer manual interventions, more control and more predictability.

This makes it straightforward to create new accounts or update security baselines consistently across the whole organization.
Security and observability: centralized logging
We treated security as a foundation, not an add-on: centralized logging and activity tracking, consistent policies and controls, the ability to analyze and respond to incidents without chasing different configurations across environments.

The result is a more governable platform and a significantly stronger audit capability, enabling compliance and supporting the future evolution of the product.

Our solution: a multi-account Landing Zone

We built a Landing Zone based on AWS Organizations: a coherent model of accounts and Organizational Units, uniform security policies enforced automatically, and a shared foundation ready to use from the start.

We introduced dedicated accounts for cross-cutting functions (security, logging, shared services) and separate accounts for each workload and environment. This way, if something goes wrong the impact stays contained within a single account, resource ownership becomes explicit, and policies can be tailored to each context.

We defined and automated everything with Infrastructure as Code and repeatable pipelines, so that every change is traceable and consistent across the organization.

Clear account model: separation by environment and workload, with explicit responsibilities and boundaries.

Centralized security policies: automated baselines applied uniformly across the entire organization.

Standard provisioning: accounts and baseline components created in an automated, repeatable way.

Results: more governance, less friction

The move to a multi-account model delivered tangible benefits for both security and operational speed:

Provisioning a new environment went from days of manual setup to a repeatable, automated process.

From manual, untracked configurations to versioned infrastructure and repeatable deployments, with full visibility into what changes and when.

From centralized bottleneck to autonomous teams: engineers can now create environments and release independently, without compromising security controls.

The new Landing Zone provides a solid foundation for growing the platform in an orderly way: adding a new workload or environment now means replicating a standard, not reinventing a setup from scratch. The robustness of this foundation has also opened the door to new joint initiatives between the company and coders51, including the development of innovative solutions powered by artificial intelligence.

If your organization has also grown "firefighting its way" through AWS and you want to regain governance without losing velocity, you have a partner ready to help.

To modernize your cloud platform without compromises and with absolute safety, now you know who you can rely on.