Executive summary

This guide offers a list of strategies and tactics that governments worldwide use to break down innovation barriers and tackle mission-critical operations with the cloud in four distinct phases. These strategies can be adopted as a whole, or in component pieces.

In the initial Vision phase (2-6 months), AWS recommends setting the vision and laying the foundational elements to permit the organization to flourish in a new cloud-based environment in five actions:

1. Establish the leadership team and dividing responsibilities allows the organization to understand who is accountable for which workstreams.

2. Create a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE). This must include people from across all impacted business segments, with cross-functional skills and experiences. This is important for successful migration at scale. Organizations build subject matter expertise, achieve buy-in, earn trust, and establish effective guidelines that meet their business requirements.

3. Host AWS Immersion Days . These are day-long, in-person technical workshops that AWS Solutions Architects create to help customers learn how to best leverage the AWS platform to unlock business potential and meet key objectives.

4. Complete a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA). This is a process of gaining insights into your organization maturity. It helps you understand your current cloud-readiness strengths and weaknesses, and builds an action plan to close identified gaps.

5. Build a pilot / proof of concept and start validating the technologies. To inform decision making, testing is a must-have practice for enterprise application development teams. With the elasticity and scalability provided by the cloud, it is important to predict and understand application behavior in a real-world scenario.

As part of the second Getting Started phase, (2-6 months) AWS recommends getting started and diving into more hands-on approaches to early-stage adoption. AWS works with customers to advise on:

1. Architecting secure landing zones for workloads that are slated for the public, private or hybrid cloud.

2. Broadening the training landscape to develop a dedicated AWS Skills Guild, providing access to cloud education across the organization.

3. Planning for operations and governance. AWS can help guide the development of an organizational Cloud Operating Model.

4. Understanding cost via a Government Workload Assessment. This provides a high-level financial estimate of a government’s total compute, storage, and database requirements, including a comparison Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis to identify the cost savings between traditional IT and cloud adoption and operations.

5. Managing the culture and change management via established operational processes, and leadership dedicated to mobilizing the appropriate resources. This includes leading teams through the many organizational and transformational challenges presented over the course of a large-scale migration effort. For more information, see AWS Prescriptive Guidance.

In the third phase, Gaining Momentum (6-24 months), AWS recommends leveraging various programs offered, exploring how to leverage core such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute, and additional services such as Amazon Connect, as well as advanced technologies in fields like Artificial Intelligence such as Amazon Rekognition, Machine Learning (ML) such as Amazon Sagemaker, Serverless or Internet of Things applications. In this phase it is also recommend implementing mechanisms and policies that support continuous improvement. Engage with AWS to obtain ongoing learning for your cloud teams, including attending re:Invent, AWS Summits, and tracking new products and services via the daily blog.

In the fourth and final phase, Strengthen and Reinforce (6-24 months), AWS recommends instituting mechanisms to measure the organization’s project implementations to the cloud. AWS provides a set of flexible services designed to enable companies to more rapidly and reliably build and deliver products using AWS and DevOps practices. These services simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, and monitoring your application and infrastructure performance. DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. AWS also believes it is time to institute the two-pizza rule, where internal project teams should be small enough that they can be fed with two pizzas, to maintain focus on efficiency and scalability.