The phrase “cloud” refers to the internet in a metamorphic form. It depicts the reality that a cloud can store water, as well as the essence of life and travel. It is also relevant for how the internet’s massive server farm infrastructure resembles a dense white cloud, making connections and disseminating data as it floats.
Cloud adoption helps businesses reduce costs and risks while expanding their databases. Organizations and enterprises use cloud computing to store, manage, and process data over the internet. Cloud Adoption Frameworks help organizations align business and technological agendas, making it easier to identify and mitigate risks before, during, and after cloud migration. The Cloud Adoption Framework includes planning, preparation, migration, governance, and other elements.
The first step in using cloud services for your business is to create a solid plan. Major public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure developed Cloud Adoption Frameworks (CAF) to help organizations plan and implement the business and technological strategies needed to adapt to the cloud. Corporate decision-makers can leverage their best practices, documentation, and tools to achieve short- and long-term goals.
How Does Cloud Adoption Work?
Before making any migration to the cloud, consider the following three important measures. These are some of them:
- Assessment – Before moving forward with cloud adoption, IT decision-makers must examine the potential and barriers involved. The company should review the benefits and pitfalls associated with previous cloud deployments.
- Planning – After completing their assessment, organizations need to plan their particular cloud strategy. IT executives should select platforms and services that are widely used in a sector and are easy to deploy. Also, they must decide whether the cloud will be public, private, or hybrid.
- Adoption – It is important to devise risk mitigation techniques during the adoption phase. Reiteration and scalability need a broad understanding of servers, software, and data repositories.
- Optimization – Having adopted the cloud, now is the time to optimize its use. With constant communication with the executive team, IT leaders can develop new and enhanced solutions for future activities and processes using cloud computing.
Three Key Pillars of Cloud Adoption Framework
Cloud Adoption Framework has three pillars:
- Cloud Strategy & Adoption
Embracing the cloud requires a deep understanding of this pillar to realize the company’s goals and strategies. Business cases for cloud services begin by determining the total cost of ownership (TCO) and the return on investment (ROI). To learn more about current IT readiness for the cloud, a discovery program is proposed. Using this information, a migration or transformation plan will be created with a prioritized list of activities that match the company’s goals.
The organization needs to conduct application rationalization before deciding whether migration or transformation is the best strategy for the current estate.
- Landing Zone
Hosting workloads in a landing zone is typically a private, hybrid, or public cloud (infrastructure as code). It makes it possible to standardize cloud environments consistently. They provide uniformity in naming, scaling, and access control for all tenants. Governance, compliance, and management framework are also provided.
- Well-architected Framework
A well-architected framework consists of five major features:
- Cost optimization
- Performance efficiencies
- Reliability
- Security
- Operational excellence
The goal is to develop and maintain reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective cloud services. It comprises a set of questions in the framework and can check a current or proposed architecture. It includes recommendations for each pillar as well.
When a well-architected framework is implemented, the cloud solution can achieve the following:
- Secure, reliable, and resilient by design since it uses cloud-native services
- Ensure continually improved performance to prevent potential failure to meet SLAs
- Frequently add and improve new features and technologies (via DevOps and CI/CD releases)
During the design phase of any application, it is important to use a well-architected framework to ensure that all aspects are handled. Cloud adoption frameworks help to align the technology modifications required to migrate to the cloud with a project’s goals.
