CAF is a collection of guidelines, best practices, tools, and templates from all major public cloud providers to accelerate an organization’s cloud adoption journey. Every organization has a diverse set of on-premises resources, critical data that they deal with, and regulatory compliance that they need to adhere to, and hence no one cloud adoption formula fits all. It is extremely important to have a strategy to adopt the cloud, and CAF helps business leaders and technology managers define the path of their adoption using CAF. All leading public cloud service providers have developed a version of CAF, which helps make the journey smoother for their potential customers moving into the cloud. It is a useful place to start your journey to understand your needs and do the initial assessment – that is, the maturity assessment. This maturity assessment helps you understand your existing infrastructure, processes, and readiness to adopt the cloud. It also helps the customer in choosing the right service model and IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings.
Microsoft’s CAF involves the following steps. You should also refer to the other cloud frameworks from AWS and GCP:
- Strategy: This phase involves establishing the business case for cloud adoption and defining the organization’s cloud strategy. It includes defining the organization’s goals, identifying potential benefits and risks, and selecting the appropriate cloud service provider.
- Plan: In this phase, the organization develops a detailed plan for migrating to the cloud. This includes identifying the workloads to be migrated, assessing their suitability for cloud deployment, and determining the appropriate migration strategy.
- Ready: This phase involves preparing the organization’s environment for cloud adoption. This includes establishing the necessary infrastructure, networking, and security requirements to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud. This also includes setting up the landing zone for the cloud infrastructure and defining the best practices to expand as the need arises.
- Adopt: In this phase, the organization deploys its workloads to the cloud environment. This includes configuring and evaluating the cloud infrastructure and applications to ensure they are functioning as expected.
- Govern: In this phase, the organization establishes governance policies and processes to manage its cloud-based solutions. This includes monitoring and managing cloud resources, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, and establishing security controls to protect against cyber threats.
- Manage: This final phase involves ongoing management and optimization of the cloud environment. This includes monitoring performance, managing costs, and continually improving cloud-based solutions to meet the organization’s evolving needs.
Overall, CAF provides organizations with a structured approach to adopting cloud computing technologies. By following the framework, organizations can better plan, implement, and manage their cloud-based solutions, enabling them to realize the full benefits of cloud computing while minimizing risks and costs. Now that you understand CAF, let us understand the last but very important topic of this chapter: landing zones.