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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
The Security Perspective is mainly applicable for the organization’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), IT security analysts, and information security (InfoSec) management.
The Operations Perspective strives to help stakeholders determine how they can update organizational processes and staff skills to support cloud migration. This includes:
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
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:
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:
This template guides you through the process of creating an action statement for each process or skill that requires updating. Here are several guidelines:
Each action plan template comes with the following six icons, which represent the six perspectives:
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:
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
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