An Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (2017)
Six Perspective of AWS CAF
The perspective below describe the common roles and objectives to update staff skills and organizational processes.
- Business Perspective
- Business Managers, Finance Managers, Budget Owners, and Strategy Stakeholders
- Optimize business value as they move their operations to the cloud
- People Perspective
- Human Resources, Staffing, and People Managers
- Ensure business governance in the cloud, and manage and measure cloud investments to evaluate their business outcomes
- Governance Perspective
- CIO, Program Managers, Project Managers, Enterprise Architects, Business Analysts, and Portfolio Managers
- Ensure business governance in the cloud, and manage and measure cloud investments and evaluate their business outcomes
- Platform Perspective
- CTO, IT Managers, Solution Architects
- Deliver and optimize cloud solutions and services
- Security Perspective common roles
- CISO, IT Security Managers, and IT Security Analysts
- Ensure that architecture deployed in the cloud aligns to the organization’s security control requirements, resiliency, and compliance requirements
- Operations Perspective
- IT Operations Managers and IT Support Managers
- Ensure system health and reliability during the move of operations to the cloud and then to operate using agile, ongoing, cloud computing best practices
Mapping the Journey to the Cloud
- Understand your organization’s current state, the target state and the transition required
- Set goals and create work streams that will enable staff to thrive in the cloud
- Engage stakeholders with relevant AWS CAF Perspectives to own organizational and operational change for their area
- Explore capability gaps in terms of AWS CAF Skills and Processes, define work streams and interdependencies between work streams
- Optimize collaboration on AWS
AWS CAF Perspectives: Additional Detail
Business Perspective: Value Realization
Ensure that IT is align with business needs and that IT investments can be traced to demonstrable business results.
AWS CAF Business Perspective Capabilities:
- IT Finance
- Capability to plan, allocate, and manage the budget for IT expenses given changes introduced with the cloud services consumption model
- Common budgeting change: moving from capital asset expenditures and maintenance to consumption-based pricing
- IT Strategy
- Capability to leverage IT as a business enabler
- Leveraging cloud services to reduce the need to maintain applications
- Enabling IT to focus on business alignment
- Benefits Realization
- Capability to measure the benefits received from IT investments
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) or Return on Investment (ROI) calculations coupled with budget management
- Quantifying and evaluation TCO and ROI changes with cloud services
- Directly link consumption with specific business processes
- Business Risk Management
- Capability to understand the business impact of preventable, strategic, and external risks to the organization
- With the move to the cloud, many of these constraints are reduced or eliminated
People Perspective: Roles and Readiness
AWS CAF People Perspective Capabilities:
- Resource Management
- Capability to project personnel needs and to attract and hire the talent necessary to support organization’s goals
- Acquiring new skills and processes to forecast and staff based on organization’s needs
- Incentive Management
- Capability to ensure that workers receive competitive compensation and benefits for the value they bring to your organization
- Some IT roles move from being commoditized to being highly specialized with high market demand
- Ability to provide an environment for attracting and retaining talent plays a key role in successful adoption
- Career Management
- Capability to ensure the personal fulfillment of your employees, their career opportunities, and their finance security
- Introducing change to IT career paths, requiring HR managers and people managers to update career management skills and processes
- Training Management
- Capability to ensure employees have the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their roles and comply with organizational policies and requirements
- Frequently update the knowledge and skills require to implement and maintain cloud services
- Training modalities may need to be revised to embrace the speed of change and innovation
- Organizational Change Management
- Capability to manage the effects and impacts of business, structural, and cultural change introduced with cloud adoption
- Central to successful cloud adoption
- Skills to manage ongoing change
Governance Perspective: Prioritization and Control
AWS CAF Governance Perspective Capabilities:
- Portfolio Management
- Capability to manage and prioritize IT investments, programs, and projects in alignment with your organization’s business goals
- New skills and processes to evaluate cloud services and a workload’s eligibility for the cloud
- Program and Project Management
- Capability to manage one or several related projects to improve organization performance and complete the projects on time and on budget
- Updating the skills and processes to take advantage of the agility and cost management features of the cloud services
- Skills to manage agile-style projects
- Business Performance Management
- Capability to measure and optimize processes in support of your organization’s goals
- Rapidly experiment with new means of process automation and optimization
- New skills to define cloud-centric KPIs
- Create processes to ensure cloud consumption is mapped to business outcomes
- License Management
- Capability to procure, distribute and manage the licenses needed for IT systems, services, and software
- New skills for procurement and license management and new processes for evaluating license needs
AWS CAF Platform Perspective Capabilities:
- Compute Provisioning
- Capability to provide processing and memory in support of enterprise applications
- Skills and processes to provision cloud services
- Move from being focused on real-world logistics to being focused on virtual and fully automated processes
- Network Provisioning
- Capability to provide computing networks to support enterprise applications
- Skills and processes required to design, implement, and manage this transition
- Storage Provisioning
- Capability to provide storage in support of enterprise applications
- Skills and processes required to provision cloud-based block and file storage
- Database Provisioning
- Capability to provide database and database management systems in support of enterprise applications
- Skills and processes to provisioning standard RDMS in the cloud and leveraging cloud-native databases
- Systems and Solution Architecture
- Capability to define and describe the design of a system and to create architecture standards for the organization
- Architect skills to codify architectures in templates and create new processes for workload optimization
- Application Development
- Capability to customize or develop applications to support your organization’s business goals
- Skills and processes for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
Security Perspective: Risk and Compliance
Helps you structure the selection and implementation of security controls that meet your organization’s needs.
AWS CAF Security Perspective Core Capabilities:
- Identity and Access Management
- Capability that enables you to create multiple access control mechanisms and manage the permissions for each of these within your AWS account
- Detective Control
- 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
- Consider integrating AWS logging features into centralized logging and monitoring solutions
- Provide holistic visibility near to real time
- Infrastructure Security
- Capability to shape your AWS security controls in an agile fashion
- Automating your ability to build, deploy and operate your security infrastructure
- IT Security teams update their skills and processes so that they can leverage these new features
- Data Protection
- Capability for maintaining visibility and control over data, and how it is accessed and used in the organization
- Incident Response
- Capability to respond, reduce harm, and restore operation during and after a security incident
- Shifting primary focus of the security team from response to performing forensics and root cause analysis
Operations Perspective: Manage and Scale
AWS CAF Operations Capabilities:
- Service Monitoring
- Capability to detect and respond to issues and application health issues
- Can be highly automated, resulting in greater service uptime
- Skills to leverage cloud features for monitoring and automate many of the existing service monitoring processes
- Application Performance Monitoring
- Capability to ensure application performance meets its defined requirements
- Skills and processes to use features to monitor and right-size the cloud services to meet performance requirements
- Resource Inventory Management
- Capability to align your organization’s assets in a way that provides the best, most cost efficient service
- Removes the need to manage hardware assets and life cycle
- Simplify management of software licensing, leveraging on-demand techniques
- Skills and processes to ensure operations teas can manage cloud assets
- Release Management / Change Management
- Capability to manage, plan, and schedule changes to the IT environment
- Leveraging CI/CD techniques to rapidly manage releases and roll-backs
- Reporting and Analytics
- Capability to ensure compliance with your organization’s reporting policies and to ensure ongoing analysis and reporting of performance against key KPIs such as SLAs and OLAs (Operational-level agreements)
- Skills and processes to take advantage of new features to provide better detail and granularity in reporting and analytics
- Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR)
- 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
- Capability to select, maintain, advertise, and deliver an SLA or set of IT Services
- Control mechanism to ensure that your organization selects the services that provide the best business value while minimizing business risk