AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

Cloud computing fundamentally changes how companies obtained, use, manage, budget, and pay for IT infrastructure services.

Cloud computing helps companies trade capital for variable expenses, take advantage of economies of scale, become more agile, and go global in minutes.

There are many benefits cloud computing brings, but companies need to make fundamental changes to adopt cloud computing. These changes affect stakeholders across all organizational units - both outside and within IT. Everyone needs to support changes cloud computing provides.

AWS developed Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to guide all organizational units through cloud migration changes. You will need to update your team's skills, adapt existing processes, and introduce new ones to gain all the benefits cloud computing provides.

Thousands of companies around the globe use AWS CAF for cloud migration guidance.

Perspectives

AWS CAF organizes guidance into six perspectives (focus areas): business, people, governance, platform, security, operations. Each AWS CAF Perspective is made up of a set of CAF Capabilities. Capabilities are a composition of responsibilities owned or managed by related stakeholders. Each Capability consists of a set of CAF Skills and Processes and describes 'what' a stakeholder owns or manages in the cloud adoption journey. Generally, we can say that Business, People, and Governance Perspectives focus on business capabilities, and the Platform, Security, and Operations Perspectives focus on technical capabilities.

The goal is to identify gaps in skills and processes between the current IT environment and the future cloud environment. With a clear list of gaps, we can build a successful action plan to close these gaps.

Business Perspective

The Business Perspective is focused on ensuring that IT is aligned with business needs and that IT investments can be traced to demonstrable business results.

Typical roles: Business Managers, Finance Managers, Budget Owners, and Strategy Stakeholders.

People Perspective

The People Perspective covers organizational staff capability and change management functions required for efficient cloud adoption.

Typical roles: Human Resources, Staffing, and People Managers.

Governance Perspective

The Governance Perspective focuses on the skills and processes that are needed to align IT strategy and goals with your organization’s business strategy.

Typical roles: CIO, Program Managers, Project Managers, Enterprise Architects, Business Analysts, and Portfolio Managers.

Platform Perspective

Organizations use the capabilities of the Platform Perspective to describe the structure and design of all types of cloud architectures.

Typical roles: CTO, IT Managers, and Solution Architects.

Security Perspective

The Security Perspective helps us structure the selection and implementation of security controls that meet your organization’s needs.

Typical roles: CISO, IT Security Managers, and IT Security Analysts.

Operations Perspective

The Operations Perspective describes the focus areas that are used to enable, run, use, operate, and recover IT workloads to the level that is agreed upon with your business stakeholders.

Typical roles: IT Operations Managers and IT Support Managers.

Mapping the Journey

Each cloud adoption and cloud migration is unique. To ensure successful adoption, you need to understand your organization's current state, the target state, and the transition required to achieve the target state. With this knowledge, you can set goals and create work streams to enable all cloud benefits.

The AWS CAF provides the structure to discover what organizational skills you need to update and how to modify existing processes and introduce new ones. Work streams are iterative and change over time. In some technology areas, you may find that work streams should be integrated with one another.

In a transition to the cloud, stakeholders within each AWS CAF Perspective need to engage and actively own organizational and operational changes for their area. As work streams are implemented, your organization leverages the different AWS CAF Perspectives to understand how to communicate interdependencies between different stakeholders.

Conclusion

Cloud migration brings many benefits to each company, but it is essential to understand that cloud adoption creates fundamental changes in all organizational units. With AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF), we guide all stakeholders across all organizational units in your company to understand new skills and processes needed to benefit from cloud technology fully.

As AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we help companies of every industry and size solve their infrastructure problems with migration to the AWS cloud.

If you want to know more about cloud migration, cloud technology in general, AWS cloud, or you want to try AWS services:

• visit our cloud migration service page;
• give us a call at +43 664 255 88 55;
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.at.

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