There’s a lot to think through when planning a migration to the cloud. There are purely technical considerations, such as deciding which instance type is most appropriate for your workloads; financial considerations, such as deciding how to manage the monthly payments; plus organizational, compliance, and other points of view. The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) provides guidance for organizations that are developing their cloud plan in order to make sure no important perspective is overlooked.
AWS CAF Focus Areas
AWS CAF defines seven areas of focus or perspective to help companies plan to address the impact of cloud on each area. Be sure your cloud plan addresses needs from each perspective in order to ensure a successful transition to the cloud.
- Business perspective. The business perspective needs to be addressed before any significant implementation work proceeds. This is where you define the business value that you’ll derive from the cloud migration. Unless the business and technology teams agree on the expected results and the technology strategy is aligned with the business strategy, it will be difficult to achieve a smooth transition.
- Platform perspective. The platform perspective is where you review the technology choices you need to make. The architecture needs to be defined conceptually, functionally, and physically.
- Process perspective. The process perspective defines how IT lifecycle services will be managed after the cloud migration. This includes management of services, projects, and quality, as well as how you’ll use tools and methodologies like process automation and continuous integration.
- People perspective. Switching to cloud technology impacts people throughout your organization. The technology team will have to adjust to new deployment, monitoring, and support procedures; end users will have new ways of accessing the applications they need; compliance teams need to understand new data flows and access methods; and management needs to learn about the impact of cloud on business opportunities and decision-making. All these groups need training to help them adapt.
- Maturity perspective. The maturity perspective helps you plan for increasing the maturity of cloud usage, including identifying a target end state and developing a strategy for getting there.
- Security perspective. Migrating to the cloud changes where your data resides, how it’s accessed, and the potential risks it’s exposed to. Spend significant time reviewing your cloud adoption from a security perspective to ensure risks are addressed and appropriate compliance and governance procedures are in place.
- Operations perspective. Ultimately, your IT team is responsible for all your environments, including those in the cloud. Plan for the impact of cloud adoption on how the team will respond to incidents, meet its service level agreements, and control changes to the environment.
There’s a lot to think about when you consider your cloud migration strategy from all seven perspectives. dcVAST is experienced with all aspects of AWS and cloud, and we offer a range of cloud support including managed AWS services. If you need help working through the issues and devising your approach to cloud, contact dcVAST to create and implement a thorough cloud adoption plan.
