The 30-minute claim gets attention. What gets less attention is the seven-step pipeline that makes it possible — and more importantly, makes it reliable.
A traditional landing zone deployment involves network design, IaC development, peer review, compliance scan, approval, deployment and post-deployment verification. Done sequentially with human involvement at each stage, this takes weeks at minimum. Done with an SI, it takes months.
ZAP compresses this to 30 minutes by automating every step that does not require human judgment, and ensuring the one step that does — Platform Lead approval — is preceded by complete, accurate information.
Step 1: IPAM — conflict-free addressing
Before any infrastructure code is generated, ZAP IPAM scans every connected cloud account — every VNet, subnet and VLAN across Azure, AWS and GCP. The requesting engineer does not choose a CIDR range. ZAP assigns one that is guaranteed conflict-free based on the full registry of existing network allocations. IP address conflicts cause network outages. ZAP makes the conflict impossible by resolving it before deployment begins.
Steps 2–3: Design and pre-flight
The engineer selects parameters via the ZAP wizard: cloud provider, topology (Hub & Spoke is default for regulated environments), compliance frameworks to enforce, environment type, cost centre and project tags, and region. No IaC knowledge required.
Steps 4–5: Code generation and quality gates
ZAP IaC Engine generates production-quality, CIS-compliant Terraform for the entire landing zone — Hub & Spoke network topology, CIS-compliant NSG rules, mandatory governance tags, naming conventions, logging and monitoring configuration, identity and access baseline. A PR is raised automatically in GitHub or Azure DevOps.
The PR then passes five automated quality gates: Terraform format validation, secrets scanning, SAST analysis, ZAP Compliant Scan against CIS benchmarks (critical findings block the gate), and Terraform plan execution. All five pass in three to four minutes.
Steps 6–7: Approval and go-live
Platform Lead approval is the only step that requires human judgment — and it is supported by complete, accurate information from the five preceding automated gates.
Terraform apply executes automatically on merge. Resources created. CMDB updated. Post-deployment scan confirms compliance. Tags verified. Evidence pack entry created. Continuous monitoring begins. From step three to step seven: 20–25 minutes. Total from request to live: 30 minutes.
See ZAP live
Book a 30-minute session with the Zentej team. We show you ZAP live on our instance — landing zone, compliance scan, evidence generation, ZAP AI. No commitment.