AWS Cloud Adoption Framework overview

• Envision — Delivered as a workshop, the Envision phase helps you create a foundation for your cloud strategy that returns ongoing measurable value to your organization, connecting your business goals and outcomes to enabling technologies, identifying key measures, and helping you prioritize your cloud initiatives.

• Align — Delivered as a facilitator-led workshop that will result in an usable action plan, the Align phase helps you determine what cloud adoption means to your organization, understand the key benefits for stakeholders, establish the best approach, and drive clarity to guide your organization's change management during your cloud journey.

• Launch — AWS CAF Action Plans helps you develop workstreams for production cloud deployment, complete your cloud projects, proactively address stakeholder's concerns, and start leveraging cloud for incremental business value.

• Realize Value — Recognize and measure incremental business value and iterate to deliver against plans. Continually evaluate your cloud strategy to align with envisioned outcomes and identify additional cloud projects to realize ongoing value.

  The AWS CAF organizes guidance into six areas of focus, called perspectives. Each perspective is used to create workstreams that uncover gaps in your existing skills and processes, which are recorded as inputs. These perspectives cover distinct responsibilities owned or managed by functionally related stakeholders. In general, the Business, People, and Governance perspectives focus on business capabilities, while the Platform, Security, and Operations perspectives focus on technical capabilities.

  

AWS CAF perspectives

Following is a brief description of each AWS CAF perspective:

1. Business perspective — Common roles: Business Managers, Finance Managers, Budget Owners, and Strategy Stakeholders. Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes they will need to optimize business value as they move their operations to the cloud.

2. People perspective — Common roles: Human Resources, Staffing, and People Managers. Provides guidance for stakeholders responsible for people development, training, and communications. Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes they will use to optimize and maintain their workforce, and ensure competencies are in place at the appropriate time.

3. Governance perspective — Common roles: CIO, Program Managers, Project Managers, Enterprise Architects, Business Analysts, and Portfolio Managers. Provides guidance for stakeholders responsible for supporting business processes with technology. Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes necessary to ensure business governance in the cloud, and manage and measure cloud investments to evaluate their business outcomes.

4. Platform perspective — Common roles: CTO, IT Managers, and Solution Architects. Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes necessary to deliver and optimize cloud solutions and services.

5. Security perspective — Common roles: CISO, IT Security Managers, and IT Security Analysts. Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes necessary to ensure that the architecture deployed in the cloud aligns to the organization’s security control requirements, resiliency, and compliance requirements.

6. Operations perspective — Common roles: IT Operations Managers and IT Support Managers. Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes necessary to ensure system health and reliability during the move of operations to the cloud and then to operate using agile, ongoing, cloud computing best practices.

By identifying the gaps in skills and processes between the current IT environment and the future cloud environment, an organization can create an action plan designed to close these gaps. The AWS CAF perspectives, capabilities, skills, and processes are designed for organizations to use as they develop plans and workstreams to move from their current IT environment to the AWS Cloud, or to deploy a new environment in the AWS Cloud. Stakeholders with organizational buy-in who apply the AWS CAF structure can create an actionable plan that helps the organization quickly and effectively achieve their desired cloud adoption.