This is a continuation from the previous post.

1.       Adoption:  The cloud adoption plan at enterprise scale warrants significant investments in the creation of a new business logic. A migration plan moves those workloads to the cloud with the following three approaches: lift and shift, lift and optimize, or modernize. The migration scenarios, best practices and process improvements come with sufficient literature. Another area of emphasis is innovation. Unlike migration, this can provide the greatest business value by unlocking new technical skills and expanded business capabilities.

2.       Govern: The Governance in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is an iterative process. As cloud estates change over time, so do the cloud governance processes and policies especially for an organization that has been heavily invested in on-premises infrastructure. With the ability to create an entire virtual data center with a few lines of code, the paradigm left shifts in favor of automation. The governance benchmark tool goes a long way in realizing this vision.

3.       Manage: Cloud Management delivers strategy using planning, readiness and adoption and drives the digital assets towards tangible business outcomes. This form of management requires articulated business commitments, a management baseline, its subsequent expansion, and advanced operations and design principles.

4.       Secure:  The security in the Microsoft cloud adoption framework is a journey. It involves incremental progress and maturity and does not have a static destination.  Its end state can be envisioned, and this provides guidance for periodic assessments, alignments and definite results. Organizations like the NIST, The Open Group, and the Center for Internet Security provide standards to this effect. Establishing the security roles and responsibilities helps with resources for this deeply technical discipline.

5.       Organize: Cloud adoption cannot happen without well-organized people. Successful adoption is the result of properly skilled people doing the appropriate types of work. The approach to establish and maintain the proper organizational structure involves a. defining the type, b. cloud functions that adopt and operate the cloud, c. defining the teams that can provided various cloud functions and d. coming up with the Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed (RACI) matrix.

6.       Resources: The public cloud comes with several tools and templates for each of the above stages such as cloud journey tracker, strategy and plan template, readiness checklist, governance benchmark assessment, migration discovery checklist, solution accelerators, operations management workbook, RACI diagram, and such others.

Conclusion:  The cloud adoption framework lays the roadmap for a successful cloud adoption journey.