An Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework | AWS White Paper Summary
Tags: aws, cloud, devops, agile
Published: 2021-10-05 20:57:38

🌟 Migrating to the cloud is a process. You don't just snap your fingers and have everything magically hosted in AWS. It takes a lot of effort to get applications migrated to AWS and having a successful cloud migration is something that requires expertise. 

🌟 Luckily, many people have had successful cloud migrations in the past, so a lot of the knowledge around how to go about hosting on AWS has been captured and shared. 

🌟 AWS CAF organizes guidance into six focus areas. We describe these focus areas as Perspectives.

![Perspectives](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/sp7el1bcx8ekhcqp1j55.png)

🌟 Each AWS CAF Perspective is made up of a set of CAF Capabilities, which is a composite of responsibilities. Each Capability describes “what” a stakeholder owns or manages in the cloud adoption journey. Each Capability consists of a set of CAF Skills and Processes that provide structure to identify gaps in your existing skills and processes.

🌟 In General, Business, People, and Governance Perspectives focus on business capabilities, and the Platform, Security, and Operations Perspectives focus on technical capabilities.

____________________________________
## ___________ ➽ AWS CAF Perspectives: ___________

##1-Business Perspective: [Value Realization]
➤ Focuses on ensuring that IT is aligned with business needs and that IT investments can be traced to demonstrable business results. 
➤ Engage stakeholders within the Business Perspective to create a strong business case for cloud adoption and ensure that there is a strong alignment between your organization’s business strategies and goals and IT strategies and goals. 

✅ **Common roles:** Business Managers, Finance Managers, Budget Owners, and Strategy Stakeholders.

☞ **Capability Descriptions:**

|Capability|Description|
|-|-|
| __IT Finance__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to plan, allocate, and manage the budget for IT expenses given changes introduced with the cloud services consumption model. |
|__IT Strategy__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to leverage IT as a business enabler. Cloud services provide efficiencies that reduce the need to maintain applications, enabling IT to focus on business alignment. |
| __Benefits Realization__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to measure the benefits received from their IT investments. This represents Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) or Return on Investment (ROI) calculations coupled with budget management. |
| __Business Risk Management__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to understand the business impact of preventable, strategic, and external risks to the organization. For many, these risks stem from the impact of financial and technology constraints on agility. Organizations find that with a move to the cloud, many of these constraints are reduced or eliminated. |
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##2-People Perspective: [Roles and Readiness]
➤ 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. 

✅ **Common roles:** Human Resources, Staffing, and People Managers.

☞ **Capability Descriptions:**

|Capability|Description|
|-|-|
| __Resource Management__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to project personnel needs and to attract and hire the talent necessary to support the organization’s goals. |
| __Incentive Management__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to ensure that workers receive competitive compensation and benefits for the value they bring to your organization.  |
| __Career Management__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to ensure the personal fulfillment of your employees, their career opportunities, and their financial security  |
| __Training Management__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to ensure employees have the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their roles and comply with organizational policies and requirements.  |
| __Organizational Change Management__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to manage the effects and impacts of business, structural, and cultural change introduced with cloud adoption. |
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##3-Governance Perspective: [Prioritization and Control
➤ Provides guidance for stakeholders responsible for supporting business processes with technology. Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes that are necessary to ensure business governance in the cloud and manage and measure cloud investments to evaluate their business outcomes. 

✅ **Common roles:**CIO, Program Managers, Project Managers, Enterprise Architects, Business Analysts, and Portfolio Managers.

☞ **Capability Descriptions:**

|Capability|Description|
|-|-|
| __Portfolio Management__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to manage and prioritize IT investments, programs, and projects in alignment with your organization’s business goals. |
| __Program and Project Management__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to manage one or several related projects to improve organizational performance and complete the projects on time and on budget. |
| __Business Performance Measurement__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to measure and optimize processes in support of your organization’s goals  |
| __License Management__ | Defines your organization’s capability to procure, distribute, and manage the licenses needed for IT systems, services, and software. The cloud consumption model requires that teams develop new skills for procurement and license management and new processes for evaluating license needs. |
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##4-Platform Perspective: [Applications and Infrastructure
➤ Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes that are necessary to deliver and optimize cloud solutions and services

✅ **Common roles:** CTO, IT Managers, and Solution Architects

☞ **Capability Descriptions:**

|Capability|Description|
|-|-|
| __Compute Provisioning__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to provide processing and memory in support of enterprise applications. The skills and processes necessary to provision cloud services are very different from the skills and processes needed to provision physical hardware and manage data center facilities. |
| __Network Provisioning__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to provide computing networks to support enterprise applications |
| __Storage Provisioning__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to provide storage in support of enterprise applications  |
| __Database Provisioning__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to provide database and database management systems in support of enterprise applications  |
| __Systems and Solution Architecture__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to define and describe the design of a system and to create architecture standards for the organization |
| __Application Development__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to customize or develop applications to support your organization’s business goals. New skills and processes for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) are a critical part of designing applications that take advantage of cloud services and the agility promised by cloud computing. |
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##5-Security Perspective: [Risk and Compliance]
➤  Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes that are necessary to ensure that the architecture deployed in the cloud aligns to the organization’s security control requirements, resiliency, and compliance requirements. 

✅ **Common roles:** CISO, IT Security Managers, and IT Security Analysts.

☞ **Capability Descriptions:**

|Capability|Description|
|-|-|
| __Identity and Access Management__ |Focuses on capability to create multiple access control mechanisms and manage the permissions for each of these within your AWS Account. Privileges must be granted before your user community can provision or orchestrate resources.  |
| __Detective Control__ |Focuses on capability for native logging as well as services that you can leverage to provide greater visibility near to real time for occurrences in the AWS environment.  |
| __Infrastructure Security__ |Your AWS environment can be defined and adjusted to evolve with your workload and business requirements. This capability provides the opportunity to shape your AWS security controls in an agile fashion; automating your ability to build, deploy, and operate your security infrastructure  |
| __Data Protection__ |Focuses on capability to main visibility and control over data, and how it is accessed and used in the organization.  |
| __Incident Response__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to respond, manage, reduce harm, and restore operations during and after a security incident  |
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##6-Operations Perspective: [Manage and Scale]
➤ Helps stakeholders understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes that are 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. 

✅ **Common roles:** IT Operations Managers and IT Support Managers.

☞ **Capability Descriptions:**

|Capability|Description|
|-|-|
| __Service Monitoring__ | Focuses on organization’s capability to detect and respond to issues with the health of IT services and enterprise applications. |
| __Application Performance Monitoring__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to ensure application performance meets its defined requirements  |
| __Resource Inventory Management__ | Focuses on capability to align your organization’s assets in a way that provides the best, most cost-efficient service |
| __Release Management/Change Management__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to manage, plan, and schedule changes to the IT environment.  |
| __Reporting and Analytics__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to ensure compliance with your organization’s reporting policies and to ensure ongoing analysis and reporting of performance against key KPIs such as service-level agreements (SLAs) and operational-level agreements (OLAs).  |
| __Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR)__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to operate in the event of a significant failure of IT services and the capability to recover from those failures within the time parameters defined by your organization.  |
| __IT Service Catalog__ |Focuses on organization’s capability to select, maintain, advertise, and deliver an SLA or set of IT services  |
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References:
[Original paper](https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws_cloud_adoption_framework.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card)