Is your organisational policy driving you towards migrating your IT Services or your customer facing applications to the Public Cloud? If so, you might be wondering where to start?
The Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) helps you eat the elephant by segmenting the process of planning a move to the cloud into manageable pieces called Perspectives.
It is a framework that helps organisations develop and execute efficient and effective plans for their Cloud adoption journey. Working through its Six Perspectives helps you build a comprehensive approach to Public Cloud, ultimately enabling you to realise measurable business benefits from Cloud adoption faster and with less risk.
Business, Governance and People Perspectives focus on business capabilities, while the Platform, Security, and Operations Perspectives focus on technical capabilities.
Business Perspective
The Business Perspective helps you move from separate strategies for Business and IT to an integrated strategy. Great if you are already there, as then it helps you understand how the impact of moving to Cloud changes your IT finance model from a Total Cost of Ownership model to the use-based i.e., opex versus capex cost model of cloud services.
Plan and execute on significant strategic business goals without the commensurate significant IT investments, and further, helps you avoid the potential impacts of preventable, strategic and external risks.
Governance Perspective
With a move to the Cloud, your Governance Model changes, and the Governance Perspective provides guidance on identifying and implementing best practices for IT Governance. It helps you measure the impact of the Cloud on business objectives:
Which elements of your IT Portfolio can deliver the best return for being in the cloud?
Do you have the right project management technologies to take advantage of cloud services?
How is your licence management impacted by moving to the cloud?
People Perspective
There are few employees who don’t use IT in the performance of their role, and hence moving to the Cloud is likely to impact practically all employees. For most users, cloud applications bring improvements in the simplicity and flexibility of access, for others it enables new features and powerful capabilities.
The People Perspective helps you assess, plan for and manage the impact of organisational and structural changes. This flows on to considerations for HR, training, career progression and even incentivisation.
Importantly, it also guides you on the creation of a CCoE – a Cloud Centre of Excellence – that small but diverse team that will lead your organisation to successful cloud adoption.
Platform Perspective
The Platform Perspective helps you design, implement, and optimise the architecture of a cloud platform based on business goals and objectives. It really is the meat in the migration sandwich whether you plan to just run your IT in the cloud or develop cloud-based applications for your customers.
The Platform Perspective covers the foundation architecture, as well as the requirements for Compute, Network, Storage and Database provisioning, where provisioning shifts from an operational focus aligning supply with demand, to an architectural focus aligning services with requirements.
If you are developing applications for the cloud, you will need to consider new skills and processes to support and optimise your deployment pipeline.
Security Perspective
Moving to the Cloud makes your IT environment more robust and secure, and the Security Perspective helps you structure the selection and implementation of controls.
In particular, it guides you through:
Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication and authorisation
Detective Control to identify potential security risks
Infrastructure Security to comply with best practices and meet regulatory requirements
Data Protection for appropriate safeguards to protect data in transit and at rest.
Incident Response to define and execute a response to security situations.
Operations Perspective
Operating an on-premise IT infrastructure, embraces everything from organisational mission critical Business Continuity, to the very IT focused IT Services Catalogue, and many other items in between such as Performance Monitoring, Inventory Management, Reporting and Analytics.
With the move to cloud, the approach to many of these changes considerably and the Operations Perspective gives guidance on how to adapt your approach to IT operations to life in the cloud. Many functions change from being specific to your organisation, to very generic, and can be easily and cost-effectively outsourced.
PolarSeven are an AWS Advanced Consulting Public Sector Partner , registered and advanced supplier with SCM0020 certification and SOC Compliance, PolarSeven is uniquely placed to help public sector organisations assess their Cloud readiness and support them on their Public Cloud journey.
Contact us if you would like help using the Cloud Adoption Framework to assist with planning your migration to the cloud.