The Importance of a Cloud Adoption Framework

Article

Author: Tangent Solutions

Published: 15 September 2022

Your business has taken the first steps on its cloud journey and decided to move its workloads to the cloud. It is important to understand that there are various factors to consider in order to successfully get the most out of your cloud environment.  

Tangent Solutions works with your organisation to dissect the business strategy alongside the goals your business wants to achieve by moving to the cloud. This process is guided by the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). Essentially, a CAF assists businesses with digital transformation and accelerates business outcomes. On this basis, no two CAF outcomes will be identical.  

Tangent designs, architects, implements and migrates workloads with your specific business requirements in mind. Ultimately, cloud adoption should support long-term strategic business goals.  

Develop a Well-Architected Cloud with the Right Partner

The cloud provides a suite of data and compute solutions to deliver high-performing, secure, monitored and fault-resilient environments. To drive business impact, benefit from Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as well as achieve agility promised by the cloud, it is fundamental that holistic deployments of cloud features and functionality occur.

This needs to be done with diligence and gravitas to ensure the security of the perimeter and networks of the cloud. A business must do its due diligence during the cloud pre-adoption phase in order to benefit from migrating to the cloud.
Furthermore, the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) must be underpinned by the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework (WAF). These frameworks provide the tools and guidance for a good foundation, as well as measurement of outcomes to ensure the successful implementation of cloud technologies. Additionally, it offers the business, people and process changes required for adoption.  

In relation to the framework’s evolution, successful implementation is based on the skills and expertise of the people who implement them. Thus, selecting a partner with the right skills and knowledge is imperative to achieving optimal cloud performance.

Stages & Methodologies that Guide the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

A business that seamlessly operates in this environment is classed as a digital organisation. Building a digital business requires various building blocks in the form of technology, methodology, supporting process change and best practice implementation 

The Four Stages of Cloud Adoption Include:  

  1. Define the Strategy
  2. Plan
  3. Ready
  4. Adopt

This guidance aligns to various stages and iterations of the typical cloud adoption life cycle, ensuring easy access to the right guidance at the right time. Tangent offers a CAF Quick Start and CAF Accelerate to enable organisations to start their cloud journey. The full Cloud Adoption Framework stages are explained at a high-level below. 

The CAF Stages are underlined by the following Continuous Principles:

  • Governance and Security
  • Management

Security, governance, and management principles are fundamental to cloud environments. These must be considered at every step of the cloud journey. As such, Tangent proactively implements various technologies, methodologies, practices, and processes to ensure governance and security are built into the foundation of the cloud estate, alongside the enablement of operational monitoring and management. This ensures a smooth transition to the cloud and accelerates the realisation of promised value.  

1. Strategise

The strategy definition phase establishes the guidelines of the ‘go to cloud’ directive. The business’s motivations, justifications and outcomes, combined with the financial and technical considerations, are understood and documented with a possible ‘first-mover’ project identified.  

By ensuring that the business strategy and context are well understood, guidelines are defined, and subsequent activities and decisions are aligned to achieving the identified business outcomes. By understanding the business’s desired outcomes, Tangent ensures that the correct workloads are selected, technology is purposefully identified, and the cloud adoption plan is well-informed to align with the business.  
People coming up with strategy
Woman explaining plan

2. Plan

In order to understand an organisation’s digital estate, Tangent initiates a cloud readiness assessment. This assessment assists in rationalising an organisation’s current digital estate, identifies compute as well as architectural requirements and highlights dependencies between the various components of the ecosystem.

Moreover, an organisation needs to assess its current human capital and plan to re-skill its IT teams to readily manage and maintain IT assets in the cloud. It is important to understand that the cloud requires a specific set of skills, as its fundamental operational and management principles are different to on-premise ecosystems. Utilising this information, we develop the cloud adoption plan.

3. Ready

Here, we tangibly prepare organisations to go to the cloud. Businesses are required to make relevant decisions around resources to be deployed. This stage involves interactive sessions in order to surface the organisational structure, outline the service level requirements, storage needs, network topology, security, and compute options for the business. Tangent also focuses on establishing the architecture of the logical groupings in Azure and AWS, such as the management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups. 

In this phase, Tangent ensures that a well-architected Landing Zone is architected and lays the foundation for cloud deployments. This involves implementing policies, infrastructure, and configuration as code, this enables and results in continuous security and governance. The Landing Zone ensures a secure, high-performing, resilient, and effective infrastructure for applications and workloads into the future.  

All these activities paint a picture of what the ‘to-be state’ of the cloud environment will encompass and the projected costs while identifying possible resource options to be used for the migration as well as deployment. The outcome of this phase is significant, as the organisation can now safely manage and govern deployments within a secure environment 
Call with client
Two young black co-workers looking at tablet

4. Adopt

During the assessment, we review and contextualise the current estate utilising the Rs of rationalisation. Based on various factors, the business’s current environment will be prioritised, migrated and modernised accordingly. 

Migration refers to the purposeful selection of compute for rehosting, retaining or retiring in the Cloud, i.e. a ‘Lift and Shift’. In contrast, modernisation pertains to refactoring or rearchitecting within the cloud environment.

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Tangent will guide your business on its cloud journey utilising the Cloud Adoption Framework.