Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

Salut folks.

RightScale, a Software as a Service company, reports that more than 90% of organizations with more than 1000 employees have their workloads running in the cloud or are in the process of doing so. However, many cases of non-optimally designed or planned migrations are often reported, resulting in the organizations incurring extra costs for redesign or high recurrent operational costs. This article highlights insights on Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Azure from StreamingCloud. CAF is a full lifecycle framework enabling cloud architects, IT professionals, and business decision-makers to achieve cloud adoption goals. The hosts, Robin Smorenburg and Kevin Evans, host Jeff Mitchell, a principal technical program manager at Microsoft.

The Cloud Adoption Framework’s purpose is to help customers know how to bring their resources and investment to the cloud. It encompasses people, resources, and tools and has strategic and actionable guidance for customers to plan their cloud adoption process. It focuses on the success patterns learned from customers and partners, together with the experience Microsoft’s internal teams have gone through with adopting cloud management services.

There are several methodologies, and each is meant to encompass a set of guidance that will help you undertake your cloud adoption journey and iterate on where you are today. The adoption framework serves greenfield and brownfield deployments, guiding the processes. The framework is broken down into defining your strategy, planning, readying your organization, adopting the cloud, and managing your digital estate.

1. Define Strategy

The strategy section covers identifying where your business drivers are for cloud adoption. It determines what strategies there are for the business that adopting the cloud will drive and impact that business. The strategy goes through the business outcome and financial considerations. It also sheds light on what applications in your portfolio you will bring to the cloud and with what levels of high availability, resilience, and cost optimization. As you define that strategy, you establish your stakeholders and the critical team that will help with cloud adoption.

1. Plan

At this stage, we identify who has the executive stakeholder sponsorship within the business for cloud adoption. It also helps identify the Key Performance Indicators and the measures for success. To understand the current running environment, we get statistics on what costs the client would incur by hosting their workloads on Azure. The assessment of listing the currently running applications, the business unit owners, and the Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objectives eases the transition to the ready phase and the migration onwards.

The planning stage also examines the different operating models that businesses have. The standard models are Decentralized Operations, Centralized Operations, Enterprise Operations, and Distributed Operations, representing the other organizational structures within a company to deliver IT. Often, the customer is transitioning and looking to a different operating model. Based on their portfolio and responsibilities, the customer evaluates how to move the roles. As IT changes or the customers’ cloud adoption increases, they continuously assess how their teams align in the business to these new outcomes.

1. Ready

At this stage, we set up the platform landing zone and prepare for the applications we will bring to the cloud. Once you’ve got your plan in place and understand your strategy with the business drivers, you transition to lay out your landing zone. This phase analyzes the business structure within your Cloud Operating Model and the team that operationalizes Azure. Once we lay down the platform landing zone, we democratize the application team to have the built-in security and governance requirements when they deploy resources in the cloud.

Those requirements are implemented into guardrails in the Azure environment so that as your teams deploy their resources, they continuously get compliance checks through Azure Policy.

1. Adopt

Adopt examines the applications we have defined in our strategy and plan, then plans for them to go into application landing zones in our Azure environment. There are three adoption scenarios.

i) Migrate — a lift and shift approach to the cloud.

ii) Modernizing — we look at how the application is hosted on-prem and decide to host it with a platform as a service offering, such as Azure Kubernetes Service or Azure Virtual Desktop.

iii) Innovate — we rethink the application and its on-premises implementation, then build it entirely differently in the cloud.

1. Govern

Once your baseline is in place with Azure landing ones, govern looks at how to increase it, i.e., cost and tagging and having each of the governance pillars around the foundation for visibility into the environment.

1. Manage

It is about operationalizing the landing zone, i.e., increasing our management’s baseline. When looking at the initial inventory and assessment and visibility for Azure landing zones, how do we increase visibility and manage applications, i.e., using Log Analytics workspace in Azure landing zones?

1. Secure

After establishing your baseline, we start to enhance security. An example of a security enhancement is having logs put in place, then turning on Azure sentinel to consume these logs to give additional security insights, further enhancing our landing zone security.

1. Resources

The resources tab outlines the tools and templates that we can use at each step of the way. They include:

Azure Naming Tool — helps you to identify naming practices that the Cloud Adoption Framework outlines quickly.

Az Advertiser **— **enables you to determine which roles and permissions to put in place and their effects on resources.

Bicep —comes in handy when you are building infra as code capabilities. It has a deployment flow to understand the stages we’re going through in deploying and how the modules align at each step of the pipeline.

As we can see, using the Cloud Adoption Framework guides your Cloud migration journey and ensures that you adhere to the best industry standards for cloud deployments. Thus, as you plan to migrate your workloads to the cloud, CAF should be integrated as the roadmap to achieve success.