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What is the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework?
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a structured method to help organizations effectively migrate to AWS. Additionally, the framework provides a structure to identify and address gaps in processes and skills that can become a barrier to cloud adoption.
AWS CAF can help organizations build a practical plan they can put in action, creating defined workstreams that guide the organization’s journey to cloud adoption. Organizations can leverage the framework to maximize business value and minimize the risks associated with cloud adoption.
In this article:
- The 6 Perspectives Of AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
- AWS CAF: Creating an Action Plan
- AWS Cloud Adoption with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
The 6 Perspectives of AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
There are six AWS CAF Perspectives, which represent six different aspects of the organization that should be considered in the cloud transformation journey. These are Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each CAF Perspective is composed of capabilities, best practices, and the stakeholders managing this aspect in the organization.
CAF’s Skills and Processes concepts provide a structure designed to help organizations identify gaps in existing skills and processes.
Business Perspective
The Business Perspective aims to help stakeholders update existing staff skills and organizational processes to enable cloud adoption. It is mainly applicable for business managers, budget owners, finance managers, and strategic stakeholders.
People Perspective
The People Perspective offers guidance for any stakeholder responsible for people development, communications, and training. The goal is to help stakeholders determine how to update organizational processes and staff skills to prepare for the cloud.
The People Perspective is mainly applicable for human resources roles, managers, and staffing professionals. These stakeholders can leverage this Perspective to ensure the right competencies are staged in place during the right time.
Governance Perspective
This Perspective offers guidance that can help organizations support their unique business processes with the appropriate technology. Stakeholders can use this Perspective to determine how they can update all organizational processes and staff skills needed to ensure business governance in the cloud.
The Governance Perspective can help organizations measure and manage cloud investments to evaluate business outcomes. The Perspective is mainly applicable to the organization’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), project and program managers, business analysts, architects, and software or IT portfolio managers.
Platform Perspective
The Platform Perspective aims to help stakeholders determine how they should update organizational processes and staff skills needed to optimize and deliver cloud services and solutions. It is mainly applicable to the organization’s Chief Technical Officer (CTO), solution architects, and IT management.
Security Perspective
The Security Perspective aims to help stakeholders determine how they can update organizational processes and staff skills to ensure that the new cloud architecture aligns with:
- Security control requirements
- Compliance requirements
- Resiliency and availability requirements
The Security Perspective is mainly applicable for the organization’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), IT security analysts, and information security (InfoSec) management.
Operations Perspective
The Operations Perspective strives to help stakeholders determine how they can update organizational processes and staff skills to support cloud migration. This includes:
- Ensuring system health and reliability during migration
- Ongoing operations of new cloud systems using best practices
The Operations Perspective is mainly applicable to IT support managers and IT operations managers, as well as Software Reliability Engineers (SRE).
Related content: Read our guide to AWS migration strategy
AWS CAF: Creating an Action Plan
The AWS CAF uses the six perspectives to guide you through the creation of an action plan. As you start reviewing each Perspective, you understand how the stakeholders in each functional area should update processes and skills in support of the overall cloud adoption.
Here are the four stages of creating an action plan with the AWS CAF:
- Identify the stakeholders critical to cloud adoption.
- Determine the concerns that may impede or delay cloud adoption for each stakeholder.
- Identify processes or skills that the organization must update to address those concerns.
- Create an action plan to update all identified processes and skills.
How to create an AWS CAF Action Plan
Creating an action plan involves populating action plan templates with the processes or skills that require updating within each Perspective.
Here is how a blank AWA Business Perspective Action Plan looks like:
Image Source: AWS
This template guides you through the process of creating an action statement for each process or skill that requires updating. Here are several guidelines:
- Enter each action statement into a cell within the template.
- Begin your action statements with a verb. For example, actions needed to update skills should start with verbs such as “learn,” “train,” or “investigate.”
- Actions required to update processes should begin with verbs such as “create,” “develop,” “reevaluate,” or “update.”
Each action plan template comes with the following six icons, which represent the six perspectives:
Image Source: AWS
The output of completed perspective templates is an action plan that outlines the cloud adoption journey responsibilities for the relevant stakeholders. However, note that a combined collection of actions may become too large to manage effectively on the organizational level. Here is what you can do in this case:
- Review each prospective action plan
- Identify the actions the organization needs to complete within the next couple of weeks
- Populate those first-term actions into an Action Plan Summary template
- Use the output summary to prioritize actions at the organizational level
Ideally, you should repeat the above process in regular intervals throughout the cloud adoption journey.
Related content: For a short list of actionable steps you can use to migrate to AWS, see our AWS migration checklist
AWS Cloud Adoption with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP capacity can scale into the petabytes, and it supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes integration, and more.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP assists with lift and shift cloud migration.
Download our free eBook The NetApp Guide to Migrating Enterprise Workloads to the Cloud to learn more.
