The reality is there is no single cloud adoption journey that works for everyone. The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure provides tried-and-true advice that will guide you on your way.
This blog covers everything you must know about Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.
What Is The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework For Azure?
One Microsoft Voice on how to adopt a Cloud for our customers is the Cloud Adoption Framework. It is a collection of documentation, best practices, guidance, and assessments, and tools to assist people in their journey.
The cloud has a significant impact on how businesses employ technology resources. They can use the cloud to provide and consume resources only when they are needed.
While the cloud allows for a great deal of design flexibility, enterprises must follow a tried-and-true process when implementing cloud technologies.
The Cloud Adoption Framework satisfies this requirement. It can assist you in making decisions about cloud adoption in order to achieve a certain business goal.
How Is Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework Structured?
The Cloud Adoption Framework guides customers via a three-stage cloud adoption process:
- Plan
- Ready
- Adopt
These three major stages are preceded by a business planning phase and followed by an operations phase that develops as the cloud adoption journey progresses.
The Cloud Adoption Framework includes thorough information to guide you through the entire cloud adoption process:
- It all starts with establishing a business strategy that is aligned with actionable technology projects that achieve the intended business goals.
- It then describes how the organization must:
- Prepare its people with technical readiness.
- Adjust processes to drive business and technology changes.
- Enable business outcomes through implementation of the defined technology plan.
- Finally, governance, resources, and people, and change management are all covered in cloud operations.
1. Strategy
Consider the business impact, turnaround time, global reach, performance, and more when developing your cloud business strategy. Here are some essential areas to concentrate on:
- Establish clear business outcomes: Ensure that your path is transparent and engaging across the enterprise.
- Define business justification: Select the appropriate technology after identifying company value potential.
As your cloud adoption journey begins, implementing the first application is critical to learning and testing with confidence. Select it using a two-pronged strategy:
- Business criteria: Identify an application currently in operation where the owner has a strong motivation to move to the cloud.
- Technical criteria: Select an application that has minimum dependencies and can be moved as a small group of assets.
2. Plan
Proper planning is critical to your organization’s success as it moves forward with cloud adoption. Because your company has already made technological expenditures, you must first assess your current situation before developing a cloud journey prioritization strategy.
In this stage, you focus on two main actions:
- Rationalize your digital estate: By doing a workload assessment, you can better understand your organization’s present digital estate and maximize returns while minimizing risks.
- Create your cloud adoption plan: Create a strategy for defining and aligning priority workloads with business goals.
3. Ready
The Azure readiness guide walks you through capabilities that will help you organize resources, reduce costs, and secure and manage your business.
How to get your organization ready for this journey:
- Define skills and support readiness: Make a skills-readiness plan and put it into action:
- Address current gaps.
- Ensure that IT and business people are ready for the change and the new technologies.
- Define support needs.
- Create your landing zone: Set up a migration target in the cloud to handle prioritized applications.
4. Adopt
- The process of migrating existing digital assets to a cloud platform is known as cloud migration. Adoption is classified into two categories: migration and innovation.
- As it relates to the migration backlog, each cloud migration activity is incorporated inside one of the following processes: assess, move, optimize, and secure. After that, you’re in charge of each backlog asset.
- IT portfolio modernization and innovation improve DevOps alignment and speed up innovation across the digital estate and application portfolio.
5. Govern And Manage
- As your company migrates or deploys new applications to the cloud, keep these aspects of cloud platform management in mind:
- Define governance solutions for your cloud environment.
- Manage your cloud environment.
- The governance model for the Cloud Adoption Framework emphasizes important areas of interest. Each section pertains to distinct types of risks that the company must address as it expands its use of cloud services. Cost Management, Security Baseline, Resource Consistency, Identity Baseline, and Deployment Acceleration are the five disciplines of Cloud Governance.
Key Takeaways
Here are the six key takeaways:
- The Cloud Adoption Framework’s three primary components (plan, ready, and adopt) can be used in different stages of cloud adoption. Because cloud adoption is a journey, not a destination, it should be examined frequently.
- A modernization trigger is an event that initiates the cloud adoption journey for an enterprise. The most common modernization triggers include datacenter contracts expiring, the need to deliver applications and features faster, urgent capacity needs, a software or hardware refresh, the need to address security threats, compliance, enabling new business opportunities, and software end of support.
- The Plan phase is concerned with integrating technological decisions with business priorities, establishing clear business outcomes, and determining the best cloud rationalization strategy.
- The success of your cloud adoption journey depends on preparing your people, organization process, and environment for cloud adoption.
- What you’re actually doing determines whether or not you’ll adopt the cloud technologies you’ve identified in your plan and prepared your business for. Are you planning to migrate or experiment with a new workload on the cloud?
- Governing and maintaining your cloud infrastructure is just as important as any other level of cloud adoption. As a result, it should be carefully researched and implemented.
Knowledge check
Q 1. The Azure Cloud Adoption Framework assists clients in making the transition to the cloud. What are the framework’s three primary stages?
- Plan, Business Justification, and Implementation.
- Migrate, Test, and Optimize.
- Plan, Ready, and Adopt.
Q 2. What are the five cloud governance disciplines?
- Business risk, process, policy and compliance, resource consistency, and deployment acceleration.
- Business risk, policy and compliance, security baseline, process, and operations.
- Cost management, security baseline, resource consistency, identity baseline, and deployment acceleration.
Comment your answer in the comment box.
Conclusion
Moving to the cloud is a difficult task. It necessitates senior company leaders agreeing on the business benefit of the shift. Then they must devise a successful cloud adoption strategy that will be adopted by employees.
The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure can assist your company in quickly determining:
- When to move to the cloud.
- How to create an effective migration strategy.
- Which approach to technology migration and modernization your business should take.
References/Related
- Exam AZ-305: Azure Solutions Architect Expert Certification
- AZ 305: Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert: Step By Step Activity Guides (Hands-On Labs)
Next Task For You
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Rajesh Arunachalam says
Answer For Q1 :Plan, Ready, and Adopt.
Answer For Q2:Cost management, security baseline, resource consistency, identity baseline, and deployment acceleration.